Annette Lyon's Blog, page 28

Gearing up: FOUR YEARS

I'm just over two weeks away from my (holy cow!) four year blogging anniversary. My very first post went up on July 21, 2006.
Whoa!
It doesn't feel that long. Granted, for those first two years, I didn't know much about blogging. Much of that time was spent floundering around, figuring out this new medium of technology and communication. In fact, it was an article in Writer's Digest discussing blogs that convinced me to give it a shot. (The biggest selling point: Even a techno-idiot like me...

WNW: Spelling Protesters. Really.

I'll be the first to admit that English is a conglomeration of funky ways to spell things. That's largely because so many languages have contributed to English. We have "rules" . . . and then a thousand exceptions to each one. It's almost a surprise that any of us ever learn to read.
Let's take a quick look at a language where spelling is a piece of cake: In Finnish, spelling is the ONE easy thing. The language has an insane number of cases, all of which I had to learn at one point in grammar...

Ashleigh's Soldier & Flat Daddy

My generous readers got Ashleigh's Flat Daddy paid for before I put up her spotlight.
(That is because first, because I have the best readers EVER, and second, because I spaced telling you all about who she is until now.)
Here is Ashleigh with her sweetheart soldier, who is currently deployed:


Come July, Ashleigh's husband will have been a medic in the Army for six years. He plans to make it a career, as he loves the Army and loves serving his country. They were married in December 2008 and...

This Is Why I Write

The feedback I've had from Band of Sisters has been very much what I hoped it would be rather than what I feared it might be. Actually, the response has exceeded my expectations. I went in pretty scared.
After all, I was writing about deployment: a huge topic, one that's timely, sensitive, and one that so many people not only know about but have been through firsthand. And I'm brazen enough to attempt to capture that experience when I've never been through it?
Yet that's what I set out to...

WNW: Words HS Grads Should Know: #1-10

Several years ago on the LDStorymakers e-mail list, we had a weekly vocabulary word challenge. It consisted of words that aren't necessarily used all the time, but that we should know. The idea was to challenge those on the list to use the week's word somewhere in their writing and then report back.
It was great fun, if short-lived. Not everyone got involved, but I personally got a huge kick out of later seeing a good ten of challenge words show up in Tristi Pinkston's Season of Sacrifice...

Book Signings: The Truth

Oh, my laws. I laughed so hard when I saw this video, I just had to share it.
My kids see me go to book signings. My youngest was born right after my first book came out (and 3 days after my last book signing for it), so she literally has not known a mother who doesn't do these things.
But somehow, even though they live with me, they don't grasp what a book signing IS. They envision something along the lines of Stephanie Meyer or J. K. Rowling, with crowds of adoring readers desperate to buy...

WNW: Flarf

That is a real word. Seriously. And it's a bizarre child of the technology age.
More, it's a literary term . . . if you sort of stretch the definition of literary.
The definitions I've found for FLARF aren't that clear, at least to me. It's generally described as something like:
A form of digitally-inspired poetry, often generated from the results of Internet search engines.
Um, okay, what?
Here's how flarf works (from what I can tell; I still don't really get it): Phrases from search engines...

Nuggets on the Salt Lake Temple

I love learning more about old temples . . . especially the ones I've researched and written about (cough-cough-Spires of Stone-cough-cough).

This is a shot of me next to an Earth Stone on the Salt Lake Temple. These were the largest, most expensive, and most difficult stones to carve. Note how BIG it is!
Recently, two fun bits came to my attention about the Salt Lake Temple. They excited me, and I thought my readers might get a kick out of them too.
The first is an article at Keepapitchinin, a...

POD and Self-Publishing

I've had a ton of people ask me about self-publishing, and about CreateSpace in particular, since they're who I used for my grammar book.
First off, WHY self-publish? There are good reasons to and very bad reasons to. Thinking you'll be a sudden millionaire is right up there with why NOT to. (Ain't happening.)

A few generalizations about self-publishing:
-Non-fiction has a far better shot at having sales than fiction does
-Bookstores will almost never stock your book
-As a result, your chances...

Four Musketeers

I used to think I knew was friendship was.
When I was a kid, it meant playing house, roaming the neighborhood, doing bake sales, being invited to one another's parties (when my best friend didn't invite me to a Christmas party, saying she was told to invite other friends and having them then go caroling to my house? Yeah, it nearly killed that little nine-year-old in me).
As a high schooler, friendship was defined largely by who accepted me into their "group." For the most part, friends were...