R.J. Minnick's Blog, page 12
March 19, 2018
A Return to Show, Don’t Tell
Now…. let me see…. where were we?
(sound of foot tapping – or is it a pencil?) You were going to explain about how you show, don’t tell your story.
I was?
Oh for heaven’s sake, will you get on with I? I’ve been waiting weeks!
Not possible. It’s only been days since I posted the first part. You can re-read it if you want.
(grumble) I suppose it hasn’t been that long, but you sort of left us hanging, you know.
Well, I hope you got some writing done while you were waiting.
No, I was waiting to...
March 17, 2018
Things happen….
Well, it is early morning (12:25 a.m.) on launch day, and truthfully I am not quite done.
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I managed to get sick as I was racing toward the end, too. Since I want to make sure and do this right, I am calling a halt for the night. I will finish and turn in my files tomorrow, and all other things being equal, REMAINDER will actually launch by Wednesday. The announcement will appear here and on the Facebook page.
Keep watching, and I won’t disappoint. Really.
And so…. here’s the openin...
March 15, 2018
Omy, omy, Oh My!
It’s getting close and I’m running late, but I may make it anyway.
Meantime, here’s the blurb from the back cover of Remainder:
“We expect the Wilson Touch.”
Wilson Parker has a reputation at Bedlowe Developers. He’s Aaron Bedlowe’s right-hand man for property acquisition. And Aaron wants property. His financial empire rests on his planned communities, and it’s time to place a jewel in the crown of his most recent venture. Aaron’s next target is Remainder, Tennessee, a rural community sout...
OMG, OMG, OMG!
And the copy editor is screaming and dodging left, dodging right, racing for the end zone against a field of obstacles of daily life and extraordinary circumstances and picture selection and punctuation errors and phrasing agonies. There’s one more giant of a blocker in the way, and there’s no where to go, no way to save the game!
But now, now, here comes the rah-rah band, pumping...
March 3, 2018
Here’s some blatant BSP for you
Celebrate Smashwords ‘Read an E-Book Week’ with discounts off copies of ebooks by your favorite authors.
Author RJ Minnick‘s ebooks WHERE THE BODIES LIE BURIED and SWEET CORN, FIELDS, FOREVER are among the books offered. Just use the information below to grab your discount this week.
March 2, 2018
Show, Don’t Tell …
…What does that even mean?
The other night my son and I were discussing a Netflix show he was watching, Altered Carbon, a new show classified as neo-noir. While some of it was good, he’d realized he had finally identified what wasn’t working for it.
First off, there was a lack of nuance in it. Emotionally-speaking there were no gray areas. Two things in the show’s world – religion and elitism – were written as bad, equally bad, with no mitigating circumstances for anything. This moral code...
February 25, 2018
Linking Up
I’ve been at work recently updating a lot of my online info, and getting ready to promote my books (better). Whether you are self-published or traditionally so, BSP – that’s Blatant Self-Promotion, as people like to call it – is something of a necessary evil. Although you should try to make it not appear blatant. Blatant’s just rude.
But it is necessary, and PR will become a wedge of the pie of how you spend your work time.
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Ooops! I meant this…
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I was lucky enough to hear writer Sharon W...
February 19, 2018
Writing at the Write-In
I belong to a writers group – well, two, sort of.
This is the only writing group I’ve ever joined, and I’ve been lucky enough to find a group of people who care about writing, who are reasonable and kind in how they construct their criticism, and who are as eager to hear others’ work as they are to share their own.
I’ll write more about them periodically, but for today I’m writing about an event we have set up – twice, now – that has worked out pretty well for the participants. It’s a Write-I...
February 12, 2018
What’s Your Inspiration?
It’s a question writers often get, and many don’t know how to answer. Reasonably so, because sometimes we aren’t so much inspired as driven towards writing about particular subjects.
In this case, however, my inspiration is simple. I’ve always loved the mystery genre, but it wasn’t until I discovered antique boats through my husband and his family that I knew what kind of world I wanted to place my mysteries in (at least some of them.) The boats are beautiful, with deep histories that are so...
February 9, 2018
Getting started….again
I said to people, “Sometimes, when a building is riddled with structural problems, you just have to burn it to the ground, and build a new one.”
Well, here I am, building.
The shortest version of what happened is that while in the midst of re-organizing my on-line presence, I learned that my base site – which was tied to just about everything I put on-line that isn’t social media – had become disastrously infected with malware. To the point of being irreparable. Too difficult for me to do a...
