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Your Character’s Key Words

By Tamela Hancock Murrayon April 27, 2022

We all need passwords to log onto websites that we can hope to remember, right? So we are likely to choose configurations that mean something to us but not to others.

Here is a fun exercise you can use to think about your characters. Pretend your character needs a password, whether for a shopping site today or a safe stored under the floor in the year 1877. What word or number combination would she use? Why? The passwords your character creates say a lot about her. She’ll choose words and numbers she can identify with. Maybe:

Nana1999

50Mom

LoveytoHubs2010

70sBombshell

Fitness177

Knitter000661202

$$$$$$$Money$$$$$$$

If you try this exercise, you may gain new insights into your character.

Have fun!

I Is for Indemnification

By Steve Laubeon April 25, 2022

Publishing is not without risks. Plagiarism, fraud, and libel by an author are real possibilities. Thus within a book contract is a legal clause called indemnification, inserted to protect the publisher from an author’s antics. The indemnification clause, in essence, says that if someone sues your publisher because of your book, claiming something like libel (defamation) or plagiarism etc., …

Category: Book Business, Contracts, Copyright, Legal Issues, Publishing A-ZTag: Contracts, indemnification, lawsuit, warranty

Fun Fridays – April 22, 2022

By Steve Laubeon April 22, 2022

Counting to seven has never been harder. Here’s the challenge. This drummer is playing to a beat with seven counts in each measure. Your challenge is to clap correctly on the downbeat of each new measure. Don’t lose concentration, or you’ll lose the game! The musical score is provided on the bottom of the screen. It doesn’t help. Sometimes your creativity taps to the beat …

Category: Fun Fridays

The Way Publishing Never Was

By Dan Balowon April 21, 2022

In 1999, the book The Way Things Never Were: The Truth About the “Good Old Days” by Norman Finkelstein was published. I have a copy. My family grew weary of me referring to it in every conversation twenty years ago, so there it sits on the shelf. It is less than 100 pages, with plenty of pictures, so no one has the excuse that it is too long and complicated to read. Chapter titles …

Category: Book Business, Career, Publishing History

How to Make Me Stop Reading

By Bob Hostetleron April 20, 2022

Once upon a time, I finished every book I started reading. I had to. I felt an obligation. If I didn’t finish it, it wouldn’t “count” as a book I’d read. Right? Then, maybe ten, maybe twenty years ago, I changed. I think I realized how many books there are in the world that I want to read and how little time I had left in life to read them. And I reasoned that plowing through a book I’d lost (or …

Category: Book Proposals, Craft, Writing Craft

A 40+ Day Musical Experience

By Steve Laubeon April 18, 2022

I’ve been making an annual musical journey during the pre-Easter Lenten season. I wrote about a couple of those before (here and here). I thought it might be fun to reveal this year’s version. Since mid-February, the only music I’ve listened to in the car or while on a plane has been the collected works of Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). While most of us are familiar with his …

Category: Inspiration, Personal

He Is Risen!

By Steve Laubeon April 17, 2022

He is risen indeed! “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we …

Category: Personal, TheologyTag: Easter

Maundy Thursday

By Tamela Hancock Murrayon April 14, 2022

Today is Maundy Thursday. As you feel led, visit this passage regarding the Last Supper and meditate upon it. I can never read this passage without thinking about how often I have disappointed Christ. And no matter how much I deny it, no matter how much I wish I were perfect, I am not. I will wretchedly and miserably betray Him again. And yet He forgives. I am nothing without Him. O Lamb of God, …

Category: Personal, Theology

Writers Groups

By Dan Balowon April 13, 2022

Writers need good, personal support structures because so much of the work is done in solitude. Christian writers conferences, whether they are held online or in person, are part of this structure, as one receives training; exposure to different ways of thinking; critical review; advice from people with experience they lack; and, most importantly, relationships. But another level of support is …

Category: Communication, Conferences

Cover Bands Don’t Change the World

By Steve Laubeon April 11, 2022

by Steve Laube

I had been reading and thinking about creativity when I came across the title of today’s post as a chapter by that name in a book called The Accidental Creative: How to be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice by Todd Henry (2011). It stopped me in my tracks. I knew he was right. A cover band plays other people’s music. Often it is a new interpretation of a familiar song and sometimes …

Category: Art, Craft, Creativity, Writing CraftTag: Creativity, Writing Craft