Musings at the end of a grueling year. On December 1st 2016, To Touch a Dream will be published. It is the fifth and final volume of The Year of the Red Door. I have many feelings and emotions swirling around my heart and head. It has been a … Read more…
♦ What is The Fall of the Faere and Other Stories? Essentially, it is a collection of nine backstories related to The Year of the Red Door. The title story tells how this fantasy world came into being about the first people, the Faerekind, that populated … Read more…
About The Reader’s Companion to the Year of the Red Door Background: In a previous post, I talked about the copious notes that I compiled during the development, research, and writing of The Year of the Red Door. Part of what I said was… Some of the material was … Read more…
With the release of A Distant Light, I have passed the halfway point of publishing The Year of the Red Door. When I started out on this project, I wasn’t sure if I could get this far along. I’ve certainly learned some lessons about my approach to publishing this story. … Read more…
What is Eighteen Objects of Power about? It pertains to the world of The Year of the Red Door. It is a small book containing descriptions of eighteen magical things as reported in a newspaper supplement published in The Star, a broadsheet of Duinnor City. I have excerpted it from … Read more…
================= KeePass (http://keepass.info/index.html) Probably the most important utility that I use day-to-day. KeePass is a Password Safe and Password Manager all in one. If you’ve read my previous post about password security, you know how important this issue is to me. KeePass helps tremendously by managing all of my … Read more…
How many warnings do we need? I’ve been warning my friends for a long time about weak passwords. Now, it’s official: ALL eight-digit passwords can be broken in less than 6 hours. ALL, not just the one you are using. That’s right, all of your 8-digit passwords are useless. … Read more…
Scribus — Desktop Publishing (http://www.scribus.net/) I mainly use Scribus for the internal layouts of my books. It handles fonts, kerning, and linespacing quite well. I also find its built-in PDF conversion options a real bonus since it has lots of output options. This is especially important for POD distributors … Read more…
We’ve all had the “Aha!” experience when reading something about a character’s past that explains some quirk or motive. That’s backstory. Not all backstories make it into the narrative. Sometimes they are written down by the author but never used in the main story. But as a writer, I … Read more…
Recently, the topic of reviews came up. I see it and hear it in online forums, blogs, webinars, advice books, and practically everywhere else. In a nutshell: “At every opportunity, authors should ask, beg, borrow, or steal in order to get plenty of reviews for their books.” Um, no. I … Read more…
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