Ahhh, it’s good to be back on the regular schedule. (And no snide comments, please, about those TV ads having to do with another kind of” regularity.” :)) Let’s start with a few pieces
CRAFT
Jordyn Redwood (@JordynRedwood) starts us off with a somewhat disturbing post titled What Is “Good Enough?” Jordyn reports that an unnamed speaker–it’s implied they were from a traditional publishing house–at the recent American Christian Fiction Writers conference in Dallas asked, “Should we move away from highly curated content to just good enough content?” Is this a sign that at least this one person is giving up on quality writing? Are they surrendering to the failure of too many self-published authors to do the work necessary, in both story-editing and copy-editing, to produce top quality work, in favor of quick pseudo-success as “published” author? Does this one person represent the entire industry, the start of a trend, or just an out-lying position? Stay tuned.
Barbara O’Neal (@barbaraoneal) addresses the quality issue, in terms of how to finally produce a quality work, in Day After Day After Day–Showing Up at the Page No Matter What on Writer Unboxed. Barbara admits (gasp!) that there are periods–periods, not just days–when she hates her WIP. But she also knows that the secret to getting to a draft she’s finally happy with is–drumroll–showing up every writing day, putting her fingers on the keyboard, and writing.
Finally for this section, KM Weiland (@KMWeiland) describes Yet Another Pitfall in Multi-POV Stories: the amount of sheer space it can take to include each POV’s story line. Her solution: boil things down to essentials, both in terms of which POVs are necessary and which events within each POV’s story line are.
SOCIAL MEDIA
We’ll wrap up today with two items on social media.
The first comes from Lesley Ellen Harris (@copyrightlaws), writing on Joan Stewart’s (@PublicityHound) The Publicity Hound Blog: the 10 worst mistakes bloggers make when using photos. I won’t go through the whole list here, but most of them center around copyright violations. This isn’t a new topic but Harris does a nice job of bringing all of these things together and telling how to do things right.
Today’s final post comes from Joel Friedlander (@jfbookman): Twitter for the Absolutely Terrified Newbie Author. Much of what he writes isn’t new–yet another glossary of Twitter terminology–but the thing that is new and valuable is at least the beginning of a hint on how to decide what to post: “listen” to what the people you decide to follow are tweeting first. I know I’d benefit from doing that more. What do you think? How have you learned to use Twitter productively, if you have?
cochisewriters 