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Copper Cockeral is on Squidoo!

From: Copper Cockeral Cards & Gifts

Date: Aug 4, 2007 4:05 PM

Copper Cockeral has a new lense on Squidoo! Be sure to visit it and add it to your favorites! Why not give us a 5 star rateing while you are there!

http://www.squidoo.com/coppercockeral/

If you haven’t done so already, here’s are older lense for you to check out as well:

http://www.squidoo.com/DecorativeOrnamentsFromCopperCockeral/

Thanks for stopping by!

Old Orchard Beach

Newest item from Copper Cockeral Cards & Gifts is this mug featuring Old Orchard Beach’s Pier and ocean waves.

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Work From Home: Is it possible?

In recent weeks my comment box and messages on MySpace have been bogged down with “get paid to take survies” and other get rich quick scams. I am writing this post in responce to them, knowing that both the senders sending them well get this, and that others who are sick of getting them, well also get this. My hope is that by the end of this post you well all know the differance between a work at home job and a work at home scam.

I pray that you all well be saved a lot of time, money, and heartache as a result of reading my own experiances with working at home.

Work From Home, Is It Possible?

Everyone asks this question,  and for those of you with this goal, you  prob’ly find yourself asking it more than most people.

Yes, it is, and not really that hard to start either, though most find it hard to keep going. First you have to ask yourself, what is it you want to do?

The most successful work at home jobs are the ones you created yourself. Here are few examples of people I know who work at home:

My uncle started working at home in the 1960′s building clay bricks, and building houses for people out of them…today he owns a multi-million-dollar corperation that not only builds houses but also building brick churches, but he still runs the buseness out of his home, and he works longer and harder than the average non-home worker.

My mom worked at home too, she was a professional seamstress, sewing fancy dresses for little girls, christening gowns, and cloth dolls. At one point she bought her own brick and mortar store (the house next door to us) and was selling to summer tourists (in Old Orchard Beach we see an average of 2 million tourists each month), but the shop proved to be a bigger home business than my mother had expected. She had no time to sew the crafts anymore, which was her passion, so after 3 years, she shut it down and sold her items to other shops on consignment instead. Now she is hoping to build a web site and move her opperation online by next year.

My dad, he worked at home too, he was a rought driver for the local newspaper, delivering the Portland Press Herald, the Sunday Telegram, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times to over 1000 customers 7 days a week 365 days a year, with not one single day off for the past 21 years… his annual gas costs are over $5,000 each year, and he goes through 3 to 4 cars a year (rought driving is the number one killer of engines and transmissions) , his annual income was under $12,000 a year.

Another uncle of mine works at home, as a real estate agent. He at one point cliamed to own a multi million dollar alpaca farm in Austrailia. (I can’t verify that as I have never been to Austailia, so never saw the farm  myself). Last I heard he had given up on the real estate business in favor of yet another work at home business he had set out to create. Don’t know the details on that, or if it succeeded or flopped.

And yet another uncle works at home, buying juck from yard sales and reselling it at flea markets. His income is average of less than $10,000 a year, but he does this as a side-line hobby. If he set out to do this full time instead of part-time in his spare time, he could easily triple that figure.

I work at home: I am a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and I own a small press publishing house which I built myself from the ground up. As most writers/publishers know already, you are lucky if you break even in this business, making it a true job of passion.

So in answer to your question, does work at home exist?

Yes, it does, but it is not a get-rich-quick-scam-artist-work-at-home; that type of work at home well banckrupt you quicker than you can blink. REAL work at home is when you take a skill and use it to help those around you. If you are hired by a business, they pay you for your product/service. If you start your own business, you get paid when your customers pay you. It may look like a private or small business to the world, but it is in fact you working out of your home and thus working at home. However, it is hard work, long hours, no vacation, you get dirty, you get tired, and in the long run, not working at home would have been much less stressful and much easier.

In short working at home is not a get rich quick scheme. Working at home IS NOT getting paid to take survies.
Working at home is not, clicking on ads on Google.

Working at home is you getting a business lisence and setting up shop, either online or brick&mortar, and selling your product or services to your customers. Most people are not cut out for the hard labor and long hours of working at home, but for those of you who are, it’s the best thing you could ever do..
 

Remember:

Employers ask you to fill out a job application, and will ask for past job referances, your SSN, and your criminal records history.

If you did not fill out an application, you did not apply for a real job.

If you filled out an application, but paid for the application form, you got scammed!

and if you can’t find a business to work for: start the business you want to work for an be your own boss in your own home.

We know this, saddly from experiance.

Back in the early 1980′s my mom saw just such an ad in a magazine. BIG promises of lots of money. She sent the money in, for not one ad but 2 differant ones. The first promised big bucks for sewing baby bibs, the second for making beaded earrings. Both ads were pretty much the same: send in a certain amount of money and they’d send you the supplies, you make the items and send them back to them, they sell them. Simple, sounded great, my mom had at one time been a seamstress, she thought she could sew up a storm of baby bibs for a legit company to sell them. That’s what we all thought, we should have read the fine print…or rather, we should have taken a notice that there was no fine print to read! Or maybe that it was a P.O.Box and not an actual address that was listed in the ad, that should have tipped us off.

Well, the supplies came, most of it cheap junk that we could have gotten cheaper and better quality at a dollar store, my mom haveing been a profesional seamstress thought that useing this absolute crap to make these items seemed pretty stupid and unprofessional but, that’s the items the company used so that’s what they sent…alarm bells should have gone off than…we should have realized that no REAL manufacturer, is gonna use such poor quality supplies to make their goods.

Well, we (my mom, my dad, and me) set out to sewing baby bibs and beaded earings. Comes time to send the items back and low and behold, the P.O.Box had been cancled, the “company” turned out to never have existed, and we were stuck with a bunch of stuff we couln’t use or sell.

We learned a lesson. It wasn’t a very big investment, less than $100, but it was not money well spent…or maybe it was, because it taught us to look at these scams with open eyes and questioning minds.

We learned a lot of things:

We learned to read ads more closely.
We learned to question “companies” with ONLY a P.O.Box.
We learned to ask the company for a job application form.
We learned to ask for a history of the company.
We learned to do a background check on the company.
We learned to never pay money to get a job.
We learned to REAL manufatures don’t put ads in magazine classified.
We learned to that most manufactures only hire local residants, so that the employee has to bring the items right in to the factory to be inspected, before the company well accept and pay you.
We learned that REAL jobs assembling items for manufactures, are rare and few and far between, and that you could be on a waiting list for years before they need enough help to get all the way down to your name on their list.

Now we have the internet, and it seems that with it came millions more ways to scam people out of their hard earned money. Every day thousands of new Work-At-Home, Get-Big-Bucks websites are added to the net. A Google search will bring up millions upon millions of them.

When I look at these sites, with their promises of BIG MONEY. I laugh. You see I own more than 200 web sites, 12 fanlistings, and 13 private message boards. I know how to build a website, quite well, maybe not to proffessional standards, but pretty darned close, and than I see these scam sites: many of them are made useing Geo-Cities, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and countless other “free home pages”. Right off the bat that fact alone should set off a RED WARNING ALARM in any person, but it seems that many people do not even notice this fact, and send their money in.

A real company that intends to pay you to work for them, would not be useing a “free home page”. A small craft shop run by the sweet little old lady next door, might use a free home page to sell her knitting and cloth dolls, but she wouldn’t be asking you to send money to make money…no she’d show you a picture of her dolls with a price for each one. The Goth girl down the road might use a free site to peddel her homemade velvet capes, while the Wiccan next door lists home made soap on her MySpace. These are people like me and you who are working at home and selling what they make. These people are legit, and you’ll notice they never ask you to pay for a membership before they allow you to buy their products. These people are small business owners working from home.

The free sites that ask you to spend money to make money… those are the ones you got to watch out for. Those are the scams.

If you see a site made by a free home page site, and offering you lots of money for doing next to nothing, run for the hills, because there is no company that is going to use a free web host to seek out workers. Not a single one.

My hope in writing all of this is that it well help you to weed out the scams from the real work at home jobs.

To all: Good luck on your goal.

~~EK

Work From Home, Is It Possible?

Work From Home, Is It Possible?

Everyone asks this question, and for those of you with this goal, you prob’ly find yourself asking it more than most people.

Yes, it is, and not really that hard to start either, though most find it hard to keep going. First you have to ask yourself, what is it you want to do?

The most successful work at home jobs are the ones you created yourself…my uncle started working at home in the 1960’s building clay bricks, and building houses for people out of them…today he owns a multi-million corperation that not only builds houses but also building brick churches, but he still runs the buseness out of his home, and he works longer and harder than the average non-home worker.

My mom worked at home too, she was a professional seamstress, sewing fancy dresses for little girls, christening gowns, and cloth dolls. At one point she bought her own brick and mortar store (the house next door to us) and was selling to summer tourists (in Old Orchard Beach we see an average of 2 million tourists each month), but the shop proved to be a bigger home business than my mother had expected. She had no time to sew the crafts anymore, which was her passion, so after 3 years, she shut it down and sold her items to other shops on consignment instead. Now she is hoping to build a web site and move her opperation online by next year.

My dad, he worked at home too, he was a rought driver for the local newspaper, delivering the Portland Press Herald, the Sunday Telegram, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times to over 1000 customers 7 days a week 365 days a year, with not one single day off for the past 21 years… his annual gas costs are over $5,000 each year, and he goes through 3 to 4 cars a year, his annual income was under $12,000 a year.

Another uncle of mine works at home, as a real estate agent. He at one point cliamed to own a multi million dollar alpaca farm in Astrailia. (I can’t verify that as I have never been to Austailia, so never saw the farm myself). Last I heard he had given up on the real estate business in favor of yet another work at home business he had set out to create. Don’t know the details on that, or if it succeeded or flopped.

And yet another uncle works at home, buying juck from yard sales and reselling it at flea markets. His income is average of $10,000 a year, but he does this as a side-line hobby. If he set out to do this full time instead of part-time in his spare time, he could easily triple that figure.

I work at home: I am a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and I own a small press publishing house which I built myself from the ground up.

So in answer to your question, does work at home exist?

Yes, it does, but it is not a get-rich-quick-scam-artist-work-at-home; that type of work at home well banckrupt you quicker than you can blink. REAL work at home is when you take a skill and use it to help those around you. If you are hired by a business, they pay you for your product/service. If you start your own business, you get paid when your customers pay you. It may look like a private or small business to the world, but it is in fact you working out of your home and thus working at home. However, it is hard work, long hours, no vacation, you get dirty, you get tired, and in the long run, not working at home would have been much less stressful and much easier.

In short working at home is not a get rich quick scheme. Working at home IS NOT getting paid to take survies. Working at home is not, clicking on ads on Google. Working at home is you getting a business lisnce and settingup shop, either online or brick&mortar, and selling your product or services to your customers. Most people are not cut out for the hard labor and long hours of working at home, but for those of you who are, it’s the best thing you could ever do..

Remember:

Employers ask you to fill out a job application, and will ask for past job referances, your SSN, and your criminal records history.

If you did not fill out an application, you did not apply for a real job.

If you filled out an application, but paid for the application form, you got scammed!

and if you can’t find a business to work for: start the business you want to work for an be your own boss in your own home.

We know this, saddly from experiance.

Back in the early 1980’s my mom saw just such an ad in a magazine. BIG promises of lots of money. She sent the money in, for not one ad but 2 differant ones. The first promised big bucks for sewing baby bibs, the second for making beaded earrings. Both ads were pretty much the same: send in a certain amount of money and they’d send you the supplies, you make the items and send them back to them, they sell them. Simple, sounded great, my mom had at one time been a seamstress, she thought she could sew up a storm of baby bibs for a legit company to sell them. That’s what we all thought, we should have read the fine print…or rather, we should have taken a notice that there was no fine print to read! Or maybe that it was a P.O.Box and not an actual address that was listed in the ad, that should have tipped us off.

Well, the supplies came, most of it cheap junk that we could have gotten cheaper and better quality at a dollar store, my mom haveing been a profesional seamstress thought that useing this absolute crap to make these items seemed pretty stupid and unprofessional but, that’s the items the company used so that’s what they sent…alarm bells should have gone off than…we should have realized that no REAL manufacturer, is gonna use such poor quality supplies to make their goods.

Well, we (my mom, my dad, and me) set out to sewing baby bibs and beaded earings. Comes time to send the items back and low and behold, the P.O.Box had been cancled, the “company” turned out to never have existed, and we were stuck with a bunch of stuff we couln’t use or sell.

We learned a lesson. It wasn’t a very big investment, less than $100, but it was not money well spent…or maybe it was, because it taught us to look at these scams with open eyes and questioning minds.

We learned a lot of things:

We learned to read ads more closely.
We learned to question “companies” with ONLY a P.O.Box.
We learned to ask the company for a job application form.
We learned to ask for a history of the company.
We learned to do a background check on the company.
We learned to never pay money to get a job.
We learned to REAL manufatures don’t put ads in magazine classified.
We learned to that most manufactures only hire local residants, so that the employee has to bring the items right in to the factory to be inspected, before the company well accept and pay you.
We learned that REAL jobs assembling items for manufactures, are rare and few and far between, and that you could be on a waiting list for years before they need enough help to get all the way down to your name on their list.

Now we have the internet, and it seems that with it came millions more ways to scam people out of their hard earned money. Every day thousands of new Work-At-Home, Get-Big-Bucks websites are added to the net. A Google search will bring up millions upon millions of them.

When I look at these sites, with their promises of BIG MONEY. I laugh. You see I own more than 200 web sites, 12 fanlistings, and 13 private message boards. I know how to build a website, quite well, maybe not to proffessional standards, but pretty darned close, and than I see these scam sites: many of them are made useing Geo-Cities, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and countless other “free home pages”. Right off the bat that fact alone should set off a RED WARNING ALARM in any person, but it seems that many people do not even notice this fact, and send their money in.

A REAL company would not be useing a “free home page”…a small craft shop run by the sweet little old lady next door, might use a free home page to sell her knitting and cloth dolls, but she wouldn’t be asking you to send money to make money…no she’d show you a picture of her dolls with a price for each one. The Goth girl down the road might use a free site to peddel her homemade velvet capes, while the Wiccan next door lists home made soap on her MySpace. These are people like me and you who are working at home and selling what they make. These people are legit, and you’ll notice they never ask you to pay for a membership before they allow you to buy their products. These people are small business owners working from home.

The free sites that ask you to spend money to make money… those are the ones you got to watch out for. Those are the scams.

If you see a site made by a free home page site, and offering you lots of money for doing next to nothing, run for the hills, because there is no company that is going to use a free web host to seek out workers. Not a single one.

My hope in writing all of this is that it well help you to weed out the scams from the real work at home jobs.

To all: Good luck on your goal.

~~EK

See more progress on: work because I like to, not because I have to

Self Publish? Vanity Press? Traditonal Publisher? Something Else?

A question I see time and time again is: Is *name of business here* a self publisher, vanity press, or traditional publisher? How do I tell the differance?

While there are many branches of the publishing tree, these 3 are the big limbs, from which all the branches shoot off of. Here is how to tell them apart:
a self publisher, is an author who gets a business license, buys the ISBN #s, hires a printing press (print shop/printer) to print the books, than sells them themself… the author keeps 100% of the profits, because no one pays royalities; you keep 100% of the copyright (which btw, does not cost a penny)… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a vanity press is a print shop/printer/printing press, that does that for you, they usually ask you to pay money for them to edit your MS, they also chagre you if you want a color cover, (often they charge you for such things as “the right to keep your copyright”, or the ISBN #, in addition to the cost of everything else they chage) and than pays you a percentange (royalty), after you first pay them for the books… the royalty they pay, though it may sound high, is actually very low, because you don’t see that money until after they have deducted what you “owe them” for printing the books… in short, they make money, while you go broke, and you may or may not get to keep the rights to your book, depending on how much money you paid to buy your own rights back from them… you market the book and distribute it through local bookstores and Amazon.com

a traditional publisher, hires editors who read your MS which you send to them; they recive thousands of MSs each week, so it may take up to 2 years before they get around to reading it; after they read it, they either reject it or accept it; if they accept it, you well be sent a contact (and often with a recommendation that you go over it with your literay agent/lawyer before you sign it). Once you sign the contract and send it back, than the publisher’s laywer checks it to be certain that all is in order (and done legally). The publisher is given the tempory copyright allowing them to print and distribute your book to the public… they hire and editor to type set and spell check your MS, than they hire an artist to create the cover art, they distribute the book to bookstores worldwide, you never own them a cent, they pay you royalties

in other words:

self publishing is you starting your own business (a publishing house) and earning an income

vanity press is you doing a lot of hard work, getting your book printed, and getting scammed out of the money that should be yours, while they get rich and leave you with nothing

traditional publishing is you hireing a business to to the work for you and you both earn an income

I hope this helps

~~EK

National TV-Turnoff Week, April 23-29

Today is the first day of  National TV-Turn Off Week, April 23-29

I have decided to write a list of 101 things for you to do during this week of no TV, should you decide to take on the challange.

1. Go for a walk on the beach.
2. Read a book.
3. Write a book in 7 days.
4. Volunteer at the local  animal shelter.
5. Do a crossword puzzle.
6. Dress up like a pirate.
7. Buy a camera and use it.
8. Play an hours-long game of Monopoly.
9. Grow a crystal garden.
10. Catalog your book collection useing the Dewey Decimal System.
11. Plan a family budget.
12. Go on a camping trip.
13. Plant a vegetable garden.
14. Watch the stars.
15. Sew, knit, or crochet a blanket for a cause (Snuggles, Linus Foundation, etc.)
16. Raise a family of sea monkeys.
17. Answer all those unread emails.
18. Pay your bills.
19. Start a petition.
20. Take your family out to a fancy resturant.
21. Look for BigFoot.
22. Take in a foster pet.
23. Spend a few hours browsing in your local library.
24. Donate pet food to a local shelter.
25. Take a walk around the block.
26. Have a chat with your mom or dad.
27. Go fishing.
28. Organize your DVD collection.
29. Build a personal website.
30. Write a short story for a fiction magazine.
31. Volunteer at the local  soup kitchen.
32. Go sight-seeing.
33. Put the pictures into the photo albums.
34. Throw a “Just-As-You-Are” party.
35. Attempt to prove aliens are real.
36. Visit a local museum.
37. Take your family to an all you can eat buffet.
38. Invent something new.
39. Start to tackle the list of projects that has been getting longer.
40. Head to an amusment park.
41. Take a cruise.
42. Sew a new dress.
43. Get a family photo taken.
44. Take a child to the zoo.
45. Write a letter to someone you haven’t seen in a while.
46. Attend an art show.
47. Vacuum the car.
48. Refinish an old piece of furniture.
49. Write an article for a non-fiction magazine.
50. Go boating.
51. Start a blog.
52. Attend a book reading.
53. Solve a mystery: play a game of Clue.
54. Visit with someone in a nursing home.
55. Go to the circus.
56. Head to your local swamp to pick fiddleheads.
57. Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper.
58. Take a hike in the woods.
59. Visit an art gallery.
60. Open an online store (Zazzle, CafePress, etc.).
61. Take swimming lessons.
62. Quit smoking.
63. Plant a tree.
64. Cook a gourmet dinner.
65. Help your child with his/her homework.
66. Play a game of basketball.
67. Go birdwatching.
68. Wash the windows.
69. Get a makeover.
70. See a play.
71. Repaint your living room.
72. Read a story to a child.
73. Paint a masterpiece.
74. Go on a picnic.
75. Read a comic book.
76. Start a new career.
77. Organize a family reunion.
78. Study up on your family history.
79. Go on a diet.
80. Sing a song.
81. Write a poem.
82. Bake a cake.
83. Go horseback riding.
84. Set up an aquarium.
85. Write a letter to a prisoner.
86. Take up a new hobby, such as stamp collecting.
87. Spend the week looking for UFO’s.
88. Go rock climbing.
89. Dye your hair blue.
90. Wax your car.
91. Redecorate your bedroom.
92. Play video games with your child.
93. Write a business plan for your dream job.
94. Take dance lessons.
95. See a ballet.
96. Buy a box of crayons and draw.
97. Design your dream-house.
98. Make home-made ice-cream.
99. Dress-up and go to the opera.
100. Take you family out to a movie.
101. Visit a haunted house.
102. Write a list of a 101 things you can do.

Quote: “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” —Groucho Marx 

New Book Projects, Job Searches, & Seventh Sanctum

You may have noticed that the past couple of days, I have not been posting as often as I was; from 4 or 5 posts a day to about one every other day. There is a reason, quite simple. I got an idea for a new book, and spent the last few days researching it. As ever, one thing lead to another and now I’ve got ideas for three new books and have been working on them all at once. Of course, me writing longhand means I wasn’t online, meaning I was not here to blog. Sorry.

Other reason, is I’m still out searching for a job type job, but have yet to find one. As usual I am told that businesses just won’t hire someone who had never been to school, or someone my age who has never had a job before. (Apperantly, 7 years as a door to door salesman for Avon, doesn’t count as a job, nor does 27 years of writing… or so I’m told by interviewers.) It is getting quite depressing, as I have been seeking a job since May of 2006 and now May 2007 is just around the corner and still all of my endless applications and interviews have turned up nothing. I’m now having a hard time finding places that I have not yet applied to. I feel like I’ve run up against a brick wall, cause I’m still intent on finding a job, yet I can not find any place that I have not already been turned down.

Well, after a day of searching classified ads and online job searches, I have given it a rest for the night and am back here to say hi to you all and let you know what I’d been doing and thinking. Columbo is on TV right now, so I’m gonna go watch that now, after which I’ll be heading to Seventh Sanctum in search of some ideas for my 3 new book projects. Seventh Sanctum is such a great site, I get loads of ideas from them. If you haven’t checked them out yet, be sure to do so.

~~EK

Star Log’s Blog Carnival for Writers

I have spent the last couple of hours browsing through Blog Carnivals. I love them.  They are such a great way to find new blogs to read. Well, I submitted several posts from Star Log to some of the carnivals. When browseing the carnival index though, I was disapointed to find that more than half of those aimed at writers have been shut down and are no longer taking new submissions.

In light of that info, I am now starting a new one, to be posted on an ongoing basis here at Star Log. I have decided to hold 12 carnivals a year, one each month. Submissions are open and accepted year ’round.

The overall theme is blog posts of interest to writers. What I am looking for are posts (written by you and posted on your blog), that offer advice to writers of all levels. The prime focus being on fiction stories, though all advice for writers is accepted. Posts on “general” writing topics accepted each month. Additionaly, I’d like to have a sub-theme each month as follows:

January: Writing Mysteries

February: Writing Romance

March: Writing Children’s Fiction

April: Writing Fantasy

May: Writing Science Fiction

June: Writing Pirate Fiction

July: Writing Action/Adventure

August: Writing Gothic

September: Writing High Fantasy

October: Writing Horror

November: Writing Family Memoires

December: Writing Holiday Fiction

Submissions are due by the last day of the previous month. Blog listings will be posted the first week the month. Send your submissions here.

You can copy the following tag to add to your blog so people will have a link back to find your listing with Star Log’s Blog Carnival For Writers:

Conventional Advice that Didn’t Work for Her (or Me Either!)…

Patricia A. Duffy says that when it comes to writing,  “Conventional Advice Wouldn’t Work for Me”.  After reading her article, I have to say that basicly, she has said pretty much what I would have said, and what I do say, whenever someone asks me.

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

1) Write every day.

This piece of advice is repeated in almost every book on “how to write.” Maybe some people need this sort of discipline, but I would find it counterproductive. Sometimes I write feverishly every day. Sometimes real life intervenes. I have a demanding job and a family. If I believed I had to write every day, even when I absolutely had no time, I’d quickly grow to hate writing and I’d stop doing it. Mostly, I have more ideas than I have time to process, so “forcing myself to write” is not a problem. And during those periods when “real life” heats up and I can’t write, I don’t feel any guilt. Why should I? Writing isn’t a religious penance or a health routine. It’s something I enjoy.

My responce to what she says:

You’ve heard it preached from the pulpit of every sacred book on writing: WRITE EVERY DAY!!!

Now ask yourself this: What does writing mean to you? Is writing a hobby or a career? How did you answer?

A hobby?

If you think of writing as a hobby, than who cares when you write? No one. If you write as a hobby, than who cares if your writing gets sloppy? No one. If you write as a hobby, than who cares if you ever get published? No one. If you write as a hobby, than by all means writer seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, because you know what? If you are writing because writing is a hobby, no one cares. Why? Because hobby writers write for their own pleasure. If they get published, it’s a great big WOO-HOO! for themselves and their family. But very few hobby writers ever get published. Why? Because they are content to post their stories on message boards and web-sites and blogs. They are happy to see their work on the internet. Writing after all is just a hobby to them. They are content with what they do.  So, for writers who write as a hobby, it is not important when they write, because their family is not dependant on the writing. Just search on Google for Fan-Fiction. Millions of stories are posted all over the internet, but because they are written by hobby writers, tthose stories well never be printed in books. They well never be published, but no one cares, not even the writer. So why than does it matter if the hobby writer writes every day?

Let’s look at the other side of this story.

Now ask yourself this once again: What does writing mean to you? Is writing a hobby or a career? How did you answer?

A career?

I ask you: What is your day job? Do you  wait tables? Drive a school  bus? Are you a cashier at the local super market? Maybe you teach high-school geography? Whatever it is that you do for your day job, ask yourself this: How many days do you work each week? A few well say three, some well say four, almost all of you well say five. By law your employer is required to give you at least two days off each week. That’s a law. That law is enforced. If an employer asks you to work more than five days a week, they are required to pay you time and a half. That too is a law. Why? Because even the government knows that you can’t get the job done if you are not given a day or two of rest. If you work seven days a week, you well run down, wear out and get sloppy. Your work well suffer, because you didn’t get a day off.

So, we come back to your answer: Why do you write? Hobby or career? If you said career, than you know that being a writer is just like every other 9 to 5 job. Nine o clock you sit down at your desk and you start writing. Around noon you take an hour break for lunch. After lunch it’s back to your desk to write until five. Five o clock comes around and no matter how compelled you are to keep writing, you put down your pen, turn off the light and don’t go back to your desk again until tomorrow morning when nine o clock rolls around again. Like any other job, you take the weekend off. Why? Because for you writing is more than a hobby. For you writing is what puts food on the table. For you writing is what puts clothes on your children. Writing just paid for your teenager’s PS3. Writing pays the mortage. Writing pays the vet bills caused by the recent pet-food recall. You write because writing is your career, your job, your livelyhood. For you writing is not a hobby. You can’t afford to let you writing get sloppy and you know that, which is why you also know that it is foolish for you or any other writer to think that it is in your best interest to write every day.

And that is  why I do not write every day.

Moving on to myth #2…

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

2. Don’t Edit Until the First Draft is Done.

I edit obsessively as I go along. I like rewriting things. I can’t imagine another way to write and would be utterly incapable of completing that first draft if I didn’t do it this way.

My responce to what she says:

This, I think, depends on the writer and what they are writing about at the time. Personaly I do not believe in editing as you write, as a general rule. Why? I find that when I am writing, I  write better if I don’t stop. I have learned to ignore typos and spelling mistakes, to turn a blind eye to bad grammar, and to not listen when my mind says I should go back and re-write what I just wrote. Why? Because if I stop, it creates a speed bump. That speed bump slows me down and causes me to go lose track of what it was I was writing. So I find myself going back to where I had stopped, because I have to re-read what I wrote several times before I can remember where it was I was going with that train of thought. In a sence by stopping to edit while I was writing, I have now derailed my writing train, and put it back on a new track, and it just can’t get back onto that old track, because the old track for some odd reason is no longer there. On a road, a speed bump just jostles your car a bit and make you slow down, but on a train track, that same little speed bump not only jostles the train, but knocks it off track and sends it flying into the oncoming train on the other track. That speed bump is now a mangled mess of crumpled train cars, which ow must be towed away and tossed into  a junk heap. A huge rusted junk heap towering high above your head. The next thing you know you can’t write anything at all because all there is is a pile of mangled wreckage. You have hot a writer’s block.

So, where are we now? Well, for me, stopping to edit while I’m still writing is the deadliest thing that can happen while I’m writing. Usually, but not always. This is just me though, and as I said, all writers are differant.

Moving on…

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

3. Use Note cards or Notebooks to Organize Ideas

Even the thought of using index cards to organize fiction ideas is almost enough to make me run screaming into traffic. In my mind, these little cards will forever be associated with undergraduate term papers. I don’t use notebooks because I hate to write longhand. I do all my writing on the word processor — even background notes for novels. Actually, I prefer to do background for novels as short stories, even lame short stories with no chance of selling. I see things better that way.

My responce to what she says:

As most of you know, I never went to school. I can’t identify with term papers because I’ve never had one, let alone seen one, and I’m not realy sure what they are, except that everyone who talks about school talks about term papers too. I’m not sure what an undergraduate is, I’ll look it up next time I’ve got my dictionary at hand. For those who have followed my posts on the net since 1997, you already know that when I joined the internet world, it was my first time typing. I had never used a keyboard before in my life. Likewise, I had also never learned how to spell. I wrote at that time in what I have since been told is a form of a “native lingo of my own invention, cause by lack of previous contact with humans”. In 1997, I first I joined the internet, and became an over night celebrity, not because I posted on every forum and chat room I could find, but because people were fascinated by my complete and total lack of any ability to spell. In the years since that time, my fan following grew to a cult status as people set out to teach me how to spell via online forums.

Than came a revilation to the world, that no one had befor known: My books, the Twighlight Manor seires, several thousand pages, and countless drafts of each, had never seen typewritter, I had written all of them in longhand. The manuscipts where totally written in bright colored notebooks with Lisa Frank art on the covers: thousands of them. Some 40 boxs worth of notebooks, stacked floor to ceiling. Noetbooks that I have been writing in since 1978. Thirty years worth of notebooks.

Today, I still write my books in longhand. I still hand write all of my manuscripts in bright colored children’s note books. To date, I have only ever written one outline. I have never used index cards. I do not type my manuscripts until after haveing hand written several drafts. I do not organize my ideas, my ideas flow from my mind at a rapid rate, and I write them as they come. No notes. No note taking. They are not my style.  They do not work for me.

And finally we come to:

According to Patricia A. Duffy:

4. Keep a Story Circulating until it Sells.

This is another piece of almost universal advice that I don’t follow. I tend to select my markets rather carefully. If something is rejected at the market I’ve thought most probable for it, I will normally only try it on one or two other markets before giving up (or in some cases no other markets). Although there are a lot of magazine markets for speculative short fiction, there are actually relatively few professional markets for speculative short fiction of any given type. I guess my economics training makes me weight the possible benefit (payment for a story) by my subjective evaluation of the “odds” of being published in that magazine. If the weighted payoff is less than the postage, I put the story in a drawer and work on another one.

My responce to what she says:

In some cases, this is true, in others it is not.

Some times I write for copyrighted characters not of my own making. For these stories there is only one publisher that I can legally send the stories to. If they reject the story, than that’s it. It can’t be sent to anyone else.

More often I write stories of characters of my own invention, and for these, I can choose any publisher I damn well please. I can also choose who I DO NOT want to publish it. Than again I can also choose to do what I usually do, and that is to self publish my stories. That is how I came to own my own publishing house. It is through owning my publishing house that I came to become an editor. Today I am a writer, a publisher, and an editor, because I reserved the right to choose when, where, and to whom I sent my manuscripts too: no one!

Well, that is my take on what Patricia A. Duffy says that when it comes to writing,  “Conventional Advice Wouldn’t Work for Me”. 

~~EK

What Does “Non-Genre” Mean?

Many publications say they only accept “Non-Genre Fiction”. A common question writers ask is: “What is Non-Genre Fiction? Doesn’t all fiction have a genre?” I had just read this post and noticed a debate over what is the meaning of Genre Fiction VS Non-Genre Fiction had begun on it’s comments.  Being an editor, I think I can be of help here. So, here is my answer to that question. I hope that some of you find it helpful when submitting your future stories to publishers.When a publication says, “they’re non-genre focused”, they mean that they only want literary fiction and will automatically refuse all stories that a genre driven. A genre driven story is one that falls under the following:

Romance

Fantasy

Sci-fi

Horror

(and the many other such genres out there)

Genre driven stories are focused largely on promotion of their genre and the story focuses totally on that genre. I.e., a romance focuses on a girl’s romantic infatuation; a fantasy will focus on the life of elves wizards and he-men type characters fighting evil in a epic quest; sci-fi focuses on alien life forms traveling from one planet to the next and other such sci-fi type things; horror focuses on scaring the pants off the reader

When a publisher say “they’re non-genre focused” they want to see a slice-of-life story about the day (or week or year) in the life of so-and-so… this is what is known as non-genre or literary fiction. The story focuses on real-life type characters in real life type situations; stories that real like they could be the life of the guy next door or the girl down the road. Non-genre stories tell a story that is not dependant on a fantasy quest or the eloquent narration describing the alien landscape or the steamy sex-scenes. They simply tell a story about life and thus have no genre.

Well, that’s what I see it to mean. Feel free to comment on your own veiws as to the meaning of “non-genre”.

~~EK

Submission Guidelines for Moonsnails

 

Basic Submissions Guidlines:

This is a quick overview of our basic guidelines. See our fully detailed guidelines for each seperate genre on our Submission Guidelines website.

Status:
Moonsnails is currently accepting submissions

Title:

Moonsnails Magazine

Magazine Format:(projected)

Quarterly: 6″ x 9″, 96 – 132 pages per issue;
60 lb bright white paper, B&W text; 10pt glossy laminated perfect bound full color cover

Circulation:

world-wide though print on demand

Contact Info:

Wendy C. Allen, editor-in-chief, twighlightmanor@yahoo.com

Submission Format:

Send in body of email, 12pt Courier or Times New Roman or Send at attachment .RTF 12pt Courier or Times New Roman.

Payment:

copies only at this time; buys one time rights, (the right to print story in one issue; author retains copyright)

responce time: 2 – 6 months

Needs:

Short stories up to 13,000 words.

Literary Genre fiction. Cross-gen OK.

Rarely uses poetry. Poetry used only if it can be considered a full-fledged story, complete with characters and plot. Never accepts free-verse.

Genres Accepted:

Sci-fi, Fantasy, Gothic Romance, and “mild” Horror

Sub-Genres and Cross-Genres Accepted:

Action, Adventure, Alien Invasion, Alien Realms, Alternative Histories, Amateur Detective, Americana, Ancient Civilizations, Animal Stories, Biographical Fiction, Christmas, Classic Literature, Colonial America, Cryptozology, Dark Fantasy, Dragon Tales, Easter, Ethnic Fiction, Espionage, Faerie Realms, Fairy Tales, Family Sagas, Fantasy, Folklore, Frontier Sagas, Furries, Futuristic, Ghost Stories, Gothic Romance, Halloween, Hard Science Fiction, Haunted Houses, High Fantasy, High Seas Adventure, Historical, Horror, Humor, Inspirational, Kung Fu, Literary, Mad Scientist Sci-Fi, Mermaid Tales, Military, Mystery, Murder Mystery, Paranormal, Pirate Tales, Psychological Thiller/Terror, Regional: Maine, Regional: Quebec, Romance, Science Fiction, Serials, Short-Shorts, Slueths, Space Fantasy, Space Travel, Spiritual, Sword & Sorcery, Supernatural, Suspence, Thiller, Time Travel, Twilight Zone style, UFO stories, Unicorn Tales, Utopian Realms, Victorian, War, Western, Wizard Tales, Young Adult.

Things Rejected:

Rejects all stories that contain:

abortion, animal abuse, child abuse, cutting, death glorification, depression, depressive self-pity, drinking, drugs, elder abuse, erotica, expose`, gore, hatred, hunting, politics, pornography, sex, smoking, swearing, suicide, vulgar verbology, and stories about “how my teenage years were crap”.

Stories must be family friendly and rated PG-13 or less

Poetry Needs:

We focus on short stories, thus rarely use poetry.

Sometimes accepts poetry, at best it’s only 4 poems per year, IF it tells a story and has strong characters. Same as fiction needs, seeks longer “epic length” story poems akin to Robert Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamlin, Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven or Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs & Ham. Prefers long rhyming poems with strong characters and a strong story plot.

Poetry Rejects:

Same as fiction rejects, plus: Does not accept free-verse poetry, haiku, short poems, poems without characters, poems without plots, meaningless ramblings, odes to…, poems without rhythem, or any other type of poem that does not tell a complete story from beginning to end.

Cover Art:

Usually done “in-house”, but well consider submissions of full-color photography or paintings, covering any genre. Always seeks beach and ocean themed photos or paintings. Do not send originals. Email files as atactment. Files must be compatible with MSWorks, MSPaint, or MSPublisher 97, .jpg files prefered. Note that we can not accept .tif files, our email treats them as a virus and deletes them. See fiction for needs & rejects list. Buys one time rights.

Art & Inside Illustration:

Usually uses spot illustrations and copyright-free/public domain illustration, but well consider submissions of B&W, pen & ink, line art only … no pencil, no shading, no grey-scale, no color, our printer well not accept them. All illustrations must be 4″ x 6″ or smaller and camera ready. Do not send originals. Email files as atactment. Files must be compatible with MSWorks, MSPaint, or MSPublisher 97, .jpg files prefered.  Note that we can not accept .tif files, our email treats them as a virus and deletes them. See fiction for needs & rejects list.

Advice:

Best advise: buy a copy of Brian Froud’s Faeries. Use it as though it were our Submissions Guidelines. Treat it as your Writer’s Bible. Use it to create believable fantasy characters. Never go anywhere without it. If you want to write for us than consider Brian Froud your new best friend, read everything he ever wrote. Study every painting he ever did. Watch every film he ever created. Watch the 2 movies written by Brian Froud: Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Read the Retief series by Keith Laumer and The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. We like that kind of sci-fi best.

Watch Star Trek (the original series), Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, X-Files, and Tales From the Dark Side. Let them inspire you. If your story would make for a good episode on one of them, than we want to see it!

We like to see strong characters. Character driven stories. Well written plots. We like fantasy realms, dreamscapes, and alien planets. Creativity is always welcomed. Pirates are always good, we need more pirates. Always seeking stories about Mermaids, Sirens, Dragons, Unicorns, or other creatures of the Realm of Fay. We like to see characters that Brian Froud would have created.

Let your imagination run wild.

Twighlight Manor Press Home Page

Twighlight Manor Press Home Page

Business Plans: Moonsnails Magazine: We’re Back!

In fall of 2005 Twighlight Manor Press announced that it was planning the release of a new magazine, which at that point was untitled and it‘s genre unknown. Our original idea was to keep it local; local writers, local sales, local flavor to the stories. Market research, however showed us that that would be a very unprofitable venture that would doom our magazine to failure before it’s fifth issue. We had to rethink out plan.

Over the next several weeks we threw around ideas and finally decided that the magazine would be a fiction “literary journal”. At first we planned on “all good fiction”, but than after studying the market, realized that this was virtually a bottomless pit, that would result in more manuscript submissions than our tiny staff of four would be able to handle.

Another thing we decided early on, was that, we wanted to stand out on bookstore shelves. Looking at other magazines sold at a local bookstore, Nonesuch Books in Saco, I discovered something. Rack upon rack of magazines, where all the same: 8×11” glossy and flimsy issues, that would not stand the test of time on a bookshelf, given them a shelf life of just 3 weeks. (This short shelf life was according to a study I found online.) According to that study, only a few magazines would be shelved and saved to be read again and again for several years. These magazines had good content and a sturdy binding. I went to Nonesuch Books looking for magazines with good content and study bindings, and was amazed at how few there actually were. In the end I found only three, out of the hundreds of magazines the shop had on the racks. By the end of this stage in our study we came to one conclusion: this magazine, was NOT going to be a 8×11” glossy; instead it would read like a book, with crisp white paper and a square bound “paperback” cover.

After some more market studies, we came to the conclusion that rather than focusing on fiction in general, we would instead use the same rule we use for writing: Write what you know. In our case it would translate into: Publish what you read. All four of us are sci-fi buffs. Sci-fi movies, sci-fi TV, sci-fi comics, sci-fi books… well it seemed only natural that we would thus choose sci-fi as the genre for the new magazine.

By January of 2006 we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do with the magazine. On Space Dock 13 (the website) we announced that the magazine was a defiant go, and we were planning it’s release later that year.

With our genre in mind, we set out the name our new magazine. After several weeks of debate, only one thing was agreed upon: that the magazine must have a sci-fi sounding name and that it should reflect our local home base, namely that we are on the world’s most beautiful beach: Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

In April 2006 we introduced the world to two new websites. The first was the message board for writers: A Writer’s Desk. It was our hope that through here we would find new talent seeking to be published in our magazine. A message board built entirely to promote the magazine, today it stands on it’s own and has no connection to the magazine at all.

Our second Website was of course the homepage for our magazine. We had finally decided on a name, and that name was: Moonsnails. After a walk to the beach that cold April, me and my three brothers returned home with tote bags filled with Old Orchard’s most beloved seashell: the Atlantic Moonsnail. Later that day, while sorting the shells on the lawn, it hit me: Moonsnails was the perfect name for our magazine, it kept the local flavor and it sounded sci-fi. Later that week Moonsnails homepage went online.

By the end of April 2006 we were getting quotes from various printers, both local and online. Announcement went out with the news that Moonsnails would see its public release in September of 2006. We were off and running, and than came May 9, 2006 and the flood that washed away all of our plans, destroying everything we owned and bringing Twighlight Manor Press to an instant standstill. We lost everything, the building was condemned, and nothing survived. As far as the business was concerned, we were back at ground zero.

That same day, as a result of the flood, my dad went into a coma. In July of 2006, my dad awoke from the coma and returned home disabled and in my care. In September of 2006, instead of releasing Moonsnails, we found ourselves in the midst of fight to save our land from a local land shark. The result was my dad’s return to the hospital. In October of 2006, a fire swept through. What little we had that survived the flood, was destroyed in the fire and we were faced with fighting out Maine’s frigid winter in a tent, a fate that did not sick well with my disabled dad’s rapidly failing health.

In January of 2007, things took a turn once again, this time in our favor, and we found our selves with electricity, heat, and a roof over our heads, for the first time since May 9, 2006.

Reunited with my computer, I was amazed to find, that in spite of the flood, in spite of the fire, the hard drive remained intact, and with a few minor repairs, it runs as good as new. It looks like hell, a bent mangled mess, but who cares, all my files are still here! All my plans and templates, all those months of research and market studies: they had survived! With that knowledge in hand I set out to pick up the pieces, and once again, plans are underway, full speed ahead, to bring Moonsnails into production.

And that brings us to today. Nether flood, nor fire, nor cold of winter, could stop Moonsnails. Moonsnails rises once again.

~EK

LuLu Has a New Blog here on WordPress…

Well, my goodness! LuLu, every writer’s favorite printer, has got a blog here on WordPress!

For anyone not familiar with LuLu, you can read this post  from their blog:

So, what’s Lulu?

Posted by henryhutton under Lulu , publishing
1 Comment 

Good question. Let’s start here:

Our founder is Bob Young of Linux fame. He founded Red Hat in order to bring Linux into the world as a viable product that could compete against Microsoft, and harnessed the power of a world-wide developer community. And, as you know, Linux is open source, so users have much more control over how they use it, and therefore aren’t at the mercy of someone else to improve it. They, the user of the product, hold the keys to the castle. If you want to have a feature added to Microsoft Word you can request it, and you might get it in a few years if enough people complain. If you want a feature or functionality added to Linux that can happen much easier, and generally in a level playing field.

In many ways Lulu was the same idea, but taken one step further…
CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS POST

testing tags

having a problem getting posts to show up… testing to see if tags are working yet

Attack of the POD People! They are not evil.

Are you a self publisher? Maybe you have a manuscript you want published, but you are not sure if self-publishing is right for you? I’m a self publisher myself and I’m always looking for ways to improve, so as you can expect I spend a lot of my “blog reading time” looking for blogs that help writers in general and self-publishers esp. Well, today I came across a new blog I hadn’t found before. My search lead me to this post:

POD is not Vanity is not Self Publish

April 1st, 2007 · No Comments

POD is a technology. It’s a way to print books. It’s quite useful for printing small quantities, particularly if there is intermittent demand. LOTS of publishers who are not vanity houses or scam mills use POD technology. University presses spring to mind, as do very small limited runs of very tightly focused books. POD is not evil.

Vanity presses can use POD technology OR they can use webfeed technology. Vanity presses are essentially printers with some support staff. They’ll help you print up nice editions of whatever you want. You pay for this. It’s called vanity because they don’t acquire the book. Acquire means there is an editorial staff choosing particular books to publish. Vanity houses do not maintain lists, issue catalogs or sell books in bookstores. Vanity presses are not evil

Self publishers can use POD technology or webfeed technology. Self publishers are not vanity presses in the everyday sense of the word. They are “vanity” in the sense that there isn’t an acquisition but the two phrases are used to mean different things in publishing. Lots of people self publish for a lot of reasons. Self publishing is not evil.

POD/scam mills are companies set up to persuade you, the author, that printing your book with their company is the equivalent to having it acquired by a publisher. They charge you money. Unlike a respectable vanity press, they don’t copy edit or produce high quality products. They are out to make money on volume. They prey on author’s insecurities and lack of knowledge. POD/scam mills are the scum of the earth.

Whether a company is the scum of the earth depends on how they run their business, not how they print their books.

There are several POD companies that do not try to persuade you that you have but to print up books with them to be on your way to fame and glory. Lulu and CafePress come to mind. There are others I’m sure.

– Miss Snark, the literary agent

[via To Publish a Book]

→ No CommentsTags: Self-Publishing · Articles · Books

to the authour of this post, I say:

bravo!

*insert clapping smilie here*

every one with a manuscript should read this post, if you know someone with a manuscript pass this on to them.

~~EK

Why Do Editors Reject MSs?

I just read this:

Treat your editors like the coach from any sports team because the editor knows their audience and only rejects writing with a good reason–even if you never learn the specifics.

Seemed like good advice, though I know nothing of sports or coaches. I do know, however, that editors have no choice but to reject 90% of what they recieve. Why? Well, for every book they have the physical ability to publish each year they receive 1,000 or more manuscripts. Many publishing houses only print 12 new books a year, one each month, and yet they receive ten times that many manuscripts in a single day. What does that mean for you the writer? That means that your manuscript had better be damn good if you want it to punch out the compatition and make it onto the editor’s desk. Once on the editor’s desk it had better glow if it wants to get picked for publication.

Why do editors reject manuscripts? Well as the editor in chief of Moonsnails Magazine and The Twighlight Manor Press, I think I might know the answer.

Here are copies of a few of the rejection forms we use:

Rejection Notice: No Space At This Time; MS Put on File:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here] we must regretfully inform you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance was based on the following:At the current time we do not have space for your story in our publication. The reason for this is that all of the space slots have already been appointed for all of our upcoming issues, meaning that it may be a year or more before we well be able to use your story. However, we did like your story, and may use it in the future. Therefore I have put it on file for possible future publication. This does not mean that we can guarantee we well accept it in the future.
Because it may be a year or more before we would be able to accept your story, you are welcomed to submit this same ms to other publishers. If it is accepted by one of them, please inform us of such. If it does get published in an other magazine, we well move it to a file for possible reprint in our magazine.
If at some point in the future we do decide to use your ms, you well be notified and payment well be sent at the than current payment rate.So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere instead? Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?
Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct any spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Who knows maybe we’d like the second version of it even better, maybe not, depends on the changes made. Do not let this rejection stop you from writing though. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.While your story was not accepted for publication in our magazine at this time, you do have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss for our consideration in the future.Sincerely,

Rejection Notice: Inappropriate Content:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here] we must regretfully inform you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance was based on one or more of the following:

explicit sex or sexual references
graphic violence for violence sake
mention of or reference to suicide
animal, child, or elder abuse
excessive use of vulgar verbology
mention of or reference to drug use — this includes one or more of the following:

smoking
drinking
illegal drug use

At this point if you are like most writers, you are sending me a long letter of complaint, protesting that your ms was misrepresented and misjudged, followed by a list of reasons why sex, drugs and gore are essential to your story, ending with a threat of some sort at the bottom. Now, before you write back to me demanding that I force an editor to re-read your ms, let’s review the problem that got it rejected in the first place.

Our editors read the mss and than accept or reject them based on our writer’s guidelines, our current needs, and most importantly the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention. You the author, are our client. We are your customer. It is the client’s job to keep the customer happy. Remember, the customer is always right. Why? Because it is the customer who knows what they want. The customer is the one with the money. Likewise, it is the customer who pays you for your work or rejects it and pays someone else whose work was better. You do a good job, the customer pays you to do your job. What is your job?
Your job is to write a story that we well want to buy. What can you do to make me want to buy your story? Ah-uh, now we come to the most important part of writing a story: the customer…that one whose always right…our customers. Who are our customers? The people who buy our magazine. The people who read our magazine. Those are our customers. Our job is to keep our customers happy, by buying stories they well want to read. To determine how to keep our customers happy, we first must know who are customers are.
Who are our customers? Let’s examine our magazine.
Our magazine is family friendly: i.e. read by families. Families include all ages. In other words it would not be unusual for the oldest grandmother to be seen reading a story from our magazine to her youngest grandchildren. Keeping that in mind, we do not accept stories that contain any of the above mentioned things.
We are also a small press, sold locally at a tourist resort town on the frigid North Atlantic coast of Maine. Most people who buy our magazine are often tourists looking for something to read on the beach. Others who buy us are local teachers and parents who trust us to publish stories that provide a safe, clean, enjoyable read for students.
What do our readers want? They want a story that they can enjoy reading again and again. They want action, adventure, fun, and entertainment. They want to read about heroes off on grand adventures, pirates seeking lost treasure, super heroes vanquishing dastardly villains, wars in outer space, knights in shining armor, spooky old haunted houses, the type of stuff that was popular in the 1950’s comic books is what our readers enjoy.
What our readers do not want is pointlessness. What is pointlessness? Pointlessness is ho-hum, I think I’ll ad a sex scene in here because I can’t think of anything else to write right now. Pointlessness is , yawn, the dialogue got to short, so I’ll stick in a few swear words. Pointlessness is, geeze this sure is going slow I’ll add a serial killing vampire and have him splatter entrails all over the pages. Pointlessness is, I can’t think of anything else to write, so I’ll have a teenager overdose herself than slice her wrists while jumping off a bridge, because my life is so dull that that’s what I might do tomorrow. Pointlessness is anything that adds nothing to the story plot, it is simply there to fill up empty space. That is pointlessness. Our readers look at sex, swearing, bloody violence, and suicide and say, “Ho-hum. Looks like yet another depressed teenager wrote that piece of crap. Booooring! When are they going to get some real writers to write some real stories. I’m going to cancel my subscription.”
As you can see, if we print those things we lose our readers. If we lose our readers, we lose our customers. If we lose our customers, we lose money. If we lose money we go bankrupt. If we go bankrupt we have to close down the magazine. If we close down the magazine, we end up homeless and starving. So, the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention is a big factor in considering a ms for acceptance. Think about it this way. When you buy a magazine to read, would you pay to read something like this:

It was a dark and stormy night, the night I wrote this story. I remember it was dark and stormy because I was watching the drug dealer outside my window that night. But my story isn’t about him, no, it’s about me and my life as a teenager. This is the coolest story in the world! OMG!!!!! It is sooooooo greetarific! It is all about how my teen years were nothing but heaping loads o’ crapola. You’ll just love to reading about how my step-dad was hell and how he raped me and beat up my dog, and how my mom was on drugs (that‘s how I knew the guy outside my window was a drug dealer), and how I run away and everything! It doesn’t have a plot, but that’s okay cause I’m the main character anyways, and I’m so great the story don’t need no plot. YAH! But than I got to thinking it’d be great if it was a horror, so I turned my step dad into a blood sucking vampire and I stuck in loads + loads of blood and gore to shock your readers with too!!!! Isn’t that jus the coolest thing??? I’ll bet no body ever thought of doing that yet. Yeah I know, it’s great, don’t thank me, I’ll settle for you kissing my ass and being my eternal slave, I’m so great you know. Oh yeah and sex too, I added a sex scene on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!!!!!! Who cares about story and plot? You don’t need a story line or a plot, not when you’ve got me! Me and blood and gore and lots of sex and great in your face kiss ass @#$&(+!#@%7 swear words to fill up the space right? Am I right or what???!! Oh yeah! I’m right baby! Can ya dig it?!

Okay, so your ms wasn’t THAT bad, but I’m hoping that by writing that example in that way, it’ll open your eyes to the fact that it is very hard for editors to WANT read a ms that is submitted without the author at least stopping to think about what our readers do and do not want. Other magazines do not publish misspelled, grammatically incorrect stories that focus on me, myself and I surrounding by naked girls and serial killers on drugs and nor do we. Okay, maybe there are a few magazines that publish that sort of thing, so, send it to them, they want it, we don’t.
As I said before, the customer is always right, and we have to think of our customers first. Our customers do not want to read misspelled and grammatically incorrect stories, nor do they want to read pointless ramblings. How long do you think a reader will stay interested in your story if you haven’t actually got a story to tell? You would not read it and you know that, and editors know it even better than you do. You’d never pay money to read something like that, so how can you expect other people to buy it? That said, why should we bother to accept it?

So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms, delete the sex, blood, and drugs and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere instead? Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?
Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct the spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. Remove the vulgarity from it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Who knows maybe we’d like the second version of it maybe not, depends on the changes made. Do not let this rejection stop you from writing though. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.

My suggestions:
Never submit a first draft. Polish your ms until it’s perfect. Write it, than re-write it.
Be sure that your story has a plot which readers want to read about with characters readers well want to read about. Who did it? What did they do? Why did they do it? Where did they do it? What was the result of what they did?
Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning tells us what the goal of the story is. The middle tells us what the character did to reach that goal. The ending tells us what happened when the character reaches the goal.
Be sure that your main character is someone that you readers well have a reason to love.
Third person stories (he said she did) get accepted more than 80% times more often than first person stories (I said I did), and second person rarely gets accepted by anyone (you said you did). 99.8% of all best sellers are written in 3rd person.
Always spell-check
I always recommend writers use Windows XP and MSWorks Word Processor. They are simple, easy to use, beginner friendly, writer friendly, and readily available to anyone with a PC.
If you use MSWorks Word Processor, set it to spell-check, tell it to include grammar checking as well, with writing style as formal. That’ll ensure that most grammar mistakes, including passive voice, are pointed out to you so that you can correct them.
Before submitting always ask for a copy of the magazine’s writer’s guidelines.
Always read at least 2 sample issues before submitting, so that you know what type of stories the magazine is looking for. Better yet, take out a year subscription and carefully examine how the magazine changes from one issue to the next.
Know thy enemy. Read the competition. Know which writers are being published in which magazines. Ask yourself, why did they get published and not me? Examine the stories that are published. How are they different from yours? How can yours become better than theirs. Think of the world of fiction as a great war. Some writers are your allies, they well help you reach the top. Some writers are your rivals, they well climb over you to get to the top first.
Be persistent and never give up.

While your story was not appropriate for publication in our magazine, you do have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss for our consideration in the future.

Sincerely,

Rejection Notice: Lack of Spelling and Grammar:

After careful consideration of your ms entitled [ms title goes here]we must regretfully advise you that we are unable to accept it at this time. The decision to deny acceptance is based on:

Lack of correct spelling and an abundance of basic grammar mistakes.

Due to the volume of mss we receive each week, we are unable to read mss which require us to first stop and make spelling and/or grammar corrections in order to be able to read it. In the 1800’s when most authors were unable to spell due to lack of education, yes, editors did correct spelling. This is not the 1800’s, it is 200 years later. In today’s world, you would be hard pressed to find an editor that would correct a writer’s spelling and grammar mistakes. Today authors didn’t grow up in log cabins 1,000 miles from civilization, and even if they do live in the Artic Circle, they type the story up on a computer, and guess what? Computers spell check, and most grammar check too.
Before your ms gets to one of our editors, it must first survive the shush pile. The slush pile is a mountain of stories, which threatens to smother our editors in a paper avalanche. Once in a while is found one or two authors who have sent their 4th or 5th draft, a well polished draft with mistakes corrected, and the ms printed neatly and formatted correctly…and editors can actually read it. Those one or two that we can read because they are clean and neat with no mistakes… those are the ones we read, because those survive the slush pile and make it on to an editor’s desk.
Which mss drown in the slush pile? If the paper is dirty, crumpled, and torn, it drowns. If the font is big and flowery, it gets tossed. If the font is smaller than 12pt, it seeps into the unknown. If the paper is scented and has confetti flying out of each page, it gets fumigated. If the paper is pink, red, yellow, blue, or any other color not white, it gets tossed before it gets a chance to blind the editor. If it reads like a dry collage text book, it gets recycled quickly…we don‘t want our editors sleeping on the job. If there are 10 or more grammar and/or spelling mistakes on the first page, it gets tossed. Of every 100 mss we receive, more than three thirds are tossed in the trash as unreadable. Sadly, your ms has fallen into the unreadable category. As a result, your ms did not survive the slush pile and went unread by our editors.
Now, before you write back to me demanding that I force an editor to read your ms, let’s review the problem that got it rejected in the first place.
Our editors read the ms and accept or reject them based on our writer’s guidelines, our current needs, and most importantly the author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention. You the author, are our client. We are your customer. It is the client’s job to keep the customer happy. Remember, the customer is always right. Why? Because it is the customer who knows what they want. The customer is the one with the money. The customer is the one who pays you for your work or rejects it and pays someone else whose work was better. What is your job? Your job is to write a story that we well want to buy. Now than, what can you do to make me want to buy your story? Ah-uh, now we come to the most important part of writing a story: the customer…that one whose always right…our customers. Who are our customers? The people who buy our magazine. The people who read our magazine. Those are our customers. Our job is to keep our customers happy, by buying stories they well want to read.
The author’s ability to capture the reader’s attention is a big factor in considering a ms for acceptance. Think about it this way. When you buy a magazine to read, would you pay to read something like this:

dis is da coolest storee i’s even did wrote!!!! OMG!!!!! It is sooooooo greetarific! it is all about how my teen years were noting but heaping loads o’ crapola, you’ll just lov at read about how my step-dad was hell, and i run away and everting! it doesn’t have a plot, but that’s okay cause I’m the main character anyways, and I’m so great the storee don’t need no plot. I stuck in loads + loads of blood and gore to shock the readers wid too!!!! Is’nt tat jus the coolest thing??? Ya I knoe, it’s great,,, oh yeah and sex too, I added a sex sence on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!!!!!! Who cares about story and plot? you don’t neeed a story line or a plot, not when you’ve got me and blood and gore and lots of sex and great@#$&(+!#@%7 swear words to fill up the space right? Am I right or what???!! can ya dig it?! howe loong do ya tink a weeder will stae intrested in yor storee ifing dey kan’t weed wat U al wote? and you hav‘nt actualy got a story to tell ? “YIKES!!!!!!!!!!!“ U wood knot weed it and yos no that, & us editers no dat even betta tan U doo, so why wood we bodder to weed it? even if it had been a goode storee, we wood not have nonw for all the mistakes… !!!! it jus 2 bad that mor wriders did knot spell an grammer checke afor dey submit

Okay, so your ms wasn’t THAT bad, but I’m hoping that by writing that example in that way, it’ll open your eyes to the fact that it is very hard for editors to read a ms that is submitted without the author first spell-checking it at least. A typo here and there is understandable and overlooked, but how often do you see a magazine publish a story in a complete lack of grammar? Other magazines do not publish misspelled, grammatically incorrect stories and nor do we. As I said before, the customer is always right, and we have to think of our customers first. Our customers do not want to read misspelled and grammatically incorrect stories.

So, you are now staring at this letter, wondering what to do next. Should you polish your ms and resubmit it? Should you submit it elsewhere. Should you give up writing like great aunt so-so told you to do?

Answers: maybe, yes, and no.
Yes, go ahead and polish your ms. Correct the spelling and grammar mistakes. Re-read it, possibly re-write it. When you’ve honed it to a fine point, send it out on it’s rounds again. Write more stories, get lots of practice, keep sending them to magazines, keep polishing each draft. Never listen to great aunts who tell you to give up.

My suggestions:
Never submit a first draft. Polish your ms until it’s perfect.
Be sure that your story has a plot which readers want to read about characters readers well want to read about.
Always spell-check
I always recommend writers use Windows XP and MSWorks Word Processor. They are simple, easy to use, beginner friendly, writer friendly, and readily available to anyone with a PC.
If you use MSWorks Word Processor, set it to spell-check, tell it to include grammar checking as well, with writing style as formal. That’ll ensure that most grammar mistakes, including passive voice, are pointed out to you so that you can correct them.
Before submitting always ask for a copy of the magazine’s writer’s guidelines.
Always read at least 2 sample issues before submitting, so that you know what type of stories the magazine is looking for. Better yet, take out a year subscription and carefully examine how the magazine changes from one issue to the next.

Know thy enemy. Read the competition. Know which writers are being published in which magazines. Ask yourself, why did they get published and not me? Examine the stories that are published. How are they different from yours? How can your become better than theirs. Think of the world of fiction as a great war. Some writers are your allies, they well help you reach the top. Some writers are your rivals, they well climb over you to get to the top first.
Be persistent and never give up.

You have potential and I wish you the best of luck on your writing career. Though I can not promise that we well ever accept your work, you are welcomed to submit other mss in the future.

Sincerely,

As I said these are premade forms. Why do we have premade forms? Because we do not accept certain things, and no matter how many time we tell people that we do not accept certain things, they still send them out anyways, thinking “well, they well make an eception for me”… no, not even if you were Stephen King, would we make an exception.

Baiscly, write the best you can, edit it yourself as best you can, always read submission guidelines carefully, and send your ms out to the places that WANT the type of work you write. Editors are desperatly seeking good writers, they want to accept your work, you just have to find the right editor for what you wrote.

~~EK

Writing Exercise: Word of the Day: Panspermia

Writing exercises come in many forms. Basicly anything that can inspire you to write a story, can become a writing exercise. Well, today I came across a word which I had never heard before: Panspermia. I looked at that word and thought: “What the hell?” It wasn’t used in a sentance so I had no way to figure out it’s meaning. It was part of a True or False quizz, which asked what the meaning of Panspermia was. Of course never hearing the word before, I had no idea what the answer was, so I guessed “False”. Turns out I guessed correctly, but still didn’t know the true meaning of the word, so it was off to the dictionary for me. Here is what I found:

Panspermia: noun

Theory that life on earth originated from organisms coming from outer space. According to this theory, the seeds of life were scattered to Earth but could have been distributed to other parts of the universe as well.

Well, now THAT I have heard of before. (Avid fan of David Dochovny ;) ) So it got me to thinking, why not have a writing exercise based on a word. That word. Well, why not? So here it is:

Write a story using the word Panspermia as your inspiration. It could be about the begining of life on earth, a sort of creation story, a court room drama about a scientist forced to defend his theory, the discovery of proof, even a fan-fic peice about Fox Mulder! Be imaginative, be creative, but most of all have fun!

~~EK

Share the Link Love

As you know I’m a regular reader of ProBlogger, it’s prob’ly the blog I read more than any other; it’s certainly the one I talk about most often here on Star Log. Well, today I was reading this post on ProBlogger, and of course it lead me to reading the links in it, includeing this one.

Oh my! I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being a link nazi!

I love surfing the blogs out there, and everytime I find one that I want to go back and read again I always forget where they are and can’t find them again…

I solved that problem though… the way I figure it, if I like the blog enough to go back and read it again, than people who like my blog, prob’ly well want to read it too, so I write a post about the blog, which contains a link to it, and than I add it to my blogroll… today my blog roll has over 100 links in it, it’s by far the biggest blog roll I’ve ever seen on a blog, but at least now I don’t lose my way back to blog I like to read.

well, an unexpected side effect of doing this is that a few days after adding my long blog roll I checked my Technorati rank, and was shocked to learn that I had gone from being in the millions up to being 200,000 that was quite switch…

well I come to find out, that several of the blogs I had added to my blogroll, had in turn added me to theirs, I was not expecting that, but that’s what did it… when I added them to mine, it raised their rank, and they did me the same favor…

WOW! You see at the time I started doing this, I didn’t know about pingbacks, I had never heard of them before, so I didn’t know that everytime I talked about a blog I liked, my blog sent them a copy of my article, so each time I sad something nice about them, they knew I had said it, only I didn’t know that was happening, so I didn’t know that the blogs I was talking about knew about my blog… well long story short, I found a great way to do link exchange and I wasn’t even trying!

~~EK

New From The Twighlight Manor Press: 2008 Calendar

Twighlight Manor Press on LuLu
Twighlight Manor Art by Wendy C. Allen 2008 12 month calendar
All art, drawings, and paintings by Wendy C. Allen, featureing the characters from the Twighlight Manor series, including EelKat, Sir Roderic, Etiole, Xavier, and more.
Price: $19.79

Writing Tip of the Day: March 28, 2007: Editing

Never resist editing. Your writing isn’t etched in stone and can always be improved for the reader. Some of you are now throwing stones, and type hate emails for me. I know, I hate editing just as much as any other writer, but fact is, it must be done, so you might as well drop that stone and get editing. Think about it this way: If your writing is as perfect as you think it is already, than editing well only make it that much better, right?

Why do you resist writing? Fear? Fear of what? Maybe you ought to write a story about a writer with a phobia of editing. Point out how crazy his phobia is and how it disrupts his writing career. This’ll do wonders for changing the way you edit your stories.

If you really have a problem with editing, there are people whose job it is to edit your work… they are known as: editors. Editors are not a thing to fear. Editors are people who love books just as much as you do, and they  want to see a great piece of fiction get printed. So wither you do your own editing or you get an editor to do it for you, never resist the art of editing. Your readers well be glad you did.

LuLu has come a long way

LuLu seems to be on many writers minds lately. It seems like everywhere I go, someone is talking about how they have published a book on LuLu. I look at these people and I say: “LuLu! You have got to be kidding! Who in their right mind would get a book published by LuLu!” I guess you can tell it’s been a very long time since I had any dealings with LuLu. I remember the old LuLu. Quite differant from the LuLu of today.

I remember LuLu when it first started, not sure when that was, but I remember searching Google for self-publishing and finding this little site that boasted to haveing printed “over 100 books”. The site was a total mess, very unprofessional, hard to navigate, and really had no info about what they did. Basicly the whole thing looked like someone had dropped a bomb on Hell. It was terrible. So terrible in fact, that I never went back.

The whole web site was based on a chat-room, and didn’t really have a home page. I remember laughing at it and saying that no one in their right mind would let such a crappy looking web site publish their book.

That was a few years ago, and their site was online, maybe a month at that point, and had a notation that it was “under construction”. I blew it off as someone’s little pipe dream and never gave it a second thought.

Well, last week I was chatting with some fellow writers and one of them was telling me how she was doing her next book with LuLu. I thought “You have got to be kidding! Is that crappy site still going!” She tells me, that yep they were and boy had they changed. So I went and checked it out, and WOW! Did they ever change! It don’t even look like the same site. I’m amazed that they have come so far in just a few short years.

Well, now I’m intreeged. This “new” LuLu has gathered my interest, and I think I’ll test it out. I’ve got a short story, I wrote a while back, but never published anywhere, yet, and I think I’ll test LuLu out with it, see what happens.

While searching for info about LuLu, I also came across this blog. I recomend it to anyone who is thinking of starting a project with LuLu, as the author has written a wounderfully detail step by step instruction of the LuLu publishing process.

I’m interested in hearing of others’ experiances with LuLu. So if you’ve ever published anything with LuLu, feel free to comment and share your thoughts, both the good and the bad. I’d like to know more about LuLu as told by the authors who’ve been published by them

~~EK

Writing Tip of the Day: March 27, 2007

Write with wisdom and careful thought, because in publishing, haste often makes waste. Have you ever stopped to think on this? You must remember that before your book gets to it’s readers, it first has to get past the agents and editors. The slush pile is as wide as it is deep,  and the only manuscripts that survive are those that were well thought out and carefully edited. Don’t be tempted to send off your first draft, fresh off the printer. Let it collect some dust for a few days. Edit it up clean and neat, and make sure that it’s the best it can possibly be, before sending it out. Remember, write with wisdom and careful thought, because in publishing, haste often makes waste, and you can’t afford to waste time or words.

~~EK

Writing Tip: Reaching 50,000 useing the 13 Step method…

I wrote this for NaNoWriMo, but it works for all your writing.

My secret to reaching 50,000

I use the 13 step method… actually it’s the 10 step method, but I like 13, so I changed it.. The 10 Step Method it’s quite a popular method used by many professional best selling writers, not sure who invented it…

anyways it helps me to write a lot of words, real fast, so I thought I’d tell you guys about it, in hopes that it’ll help someone else reach the 50,000 goal too

but here is my 13 Step version of it

Write down

Scene 1
Scene 2

etc, all the way to 13… these are your chapters, plan on having 13 of them

Think about your plot, in terms of 13 tiny stories, than write a title for each… now you have your 13 Chapter Titles

Your list should now read:

Chapter 1: “title here”
Chapter 2: “title here”

etc, all the way to Chapter 13

Now, go back to your list and add the actual scenes:

Chapter 1: The Title Here

scene 1
scene 2
scene 3
scene 4

etc, all the way to 13 scences.

do this for each chapter.

Now go back and write one scentance to describe each scene of each chapter.

Once you have completed this, you well have a complete and detailed outline to take you step by step through your story… print it up and keep it on hand when you are writing, so that you can keep your story running smoothly from one scene to the next (though you can change anything in you outline that needs changes once you start writing… it’s not a hard and fast law that you stick to the outline… the outline, just helps you to write faster, by keeping your original story idea where you can see it)

once you get going the actual writing, you plan on say, write 5 scenes a day… and you’ll find that by useing the writing a scene at a time, rather than going for word count or page count, you well write more and write faster…

I average 3,000 to 10,000 a day useing this method. yet, when I try for word count, I usually get stuck after about 500

try it and see, you’ll be amazed at how well this method works

why does it work? because you are focused on your plot, not the word count, and when you stop thinking about the words, they just start flowing out of you with out you even realizing it

thinking in chapters has helped me so much… I used to just slog along trying to write 1o pages a day… that was the goal I gave myself, 10 pages… it was murder, I kept looking down at the bottom where it said page 1 of 1, etc, and I’d stop and think:

man… I typed all that and I’m still on page 1!

than I tried for word count… and after every sentance I’d stop and check to see how many words I’d done…

“What only 7 words in that sentace! /i’ll never get done at that rate”

than one day, I’m complaining about this to my editor, and he says “get this book”… so I go and I get the book, and it’s pretty good, than I get all the books by this author (writer’s how to books) and all the books she recomended as well… ended up with like 50 books on the art of writing

and in one of them I found this 10-Step method… well me writing horror I changed it to the 13 Step method, cause I try to alway have 13 chapters… and I tried it and wow… I write so fast now! I can’t believe it!

13 works for me, cause I write horror, and I design my stories to be in 13 chapters, with 13 scenes each, cause that’s te way I’ve designed my stories to come out…

you can change it to whatever you need… say you only need 8 chapters with 5 scenes each… than that’s what would work for you…

of course, you don’t need to have the same anount of scenes per chapter either… 5 scens in chapter 1, 2 scenes in chapter 2, 12 scences in chapter 3… whatever you need to carry your story across, is what you should use

that’s what’s so great about this method, you can change it to whatever works for you and your story… there are no hard rules

it helps keep me focused on my story too…

for me, I have a BIIIIG problem, with rambling… I’ll go waaaay off topic inside the thoughts of a minor character… which in itself is not bad, but it goes off the story. Good thing about it is it gives me ideas for a spin-off story, which I write a lot of.

The outline thingy, helps me to stay on my story, I keep looking back at it, and I know where I should be, and I can stay on track easier

bad thing, is, all my spin-off need outlines, and each of them reasult in more spin offs, and I end up with too many outlines and not enough stories LOL! 

I hope this helps!

Writer’s Debate Team: Is Working At Home For You?

When one dreams of being a writer, one often forgets that writing is a career, not a hobby. This can lead to problems down the road, esp. when one is not used to working at home. So, I have created this topic to help you to do a little self-evaluateing. Read it, think it through, than write about your answer and how you came by it. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is Working At Home For You?

What are common problems that you might encounter?

What can you expect from a job out of your own home?

Have you assessed your potential for working at home happily?

You well be working for yourself. Can you be your own boss?

Going it on your own. What does it take? Do you have it in you?

Are you self-motivated?

Are you a self-organizer?

Are you able to manage your time effectivly?

How good are you at keeping a buget?

If you are married, can you manage work and family and not let one interfere with the other?

edit added on: March 29, 2007

here is a blog post that goes well with this one, I just had to add it here.