On and off I've mentioned that I've been helping a friend with his book. It's not a long book - more a nice sit-down length of about 30,000 words - so, about 160 pages the way it formatted for a 6in x 9in book. How do I know this? Because I had the honor of formatting his book. Getting to that point wasn't easy. I struggled to understand - even with YouTube videos and talking to folks - how to take a Word document and turn into a file that would agree with KDP. Then a friend from Realm Makers m…

An author is a person. He or she will go through seasons of life and writing. Sometimes an author will release three books a year for several years and then ... nothing for a whole year ... and then release one book the following year. Or an author will release one book a year for several years and have a flood gate of releases one random year before returning to the one-book-a-year pattern. No matter the pattern, books are reflections of their writers' seasons. They reveal a snippet of what's p…

Becoming an author takes a lot of research, understanding ones chosen genre, and all the accepted ins and outs that go with it. (You know, besides writing, writing, writing, and lots of editing. And marketing - so much marketing!) But these things sometimes keep authors from writing what is on his or her heart. Even just a silly short story in a totally different genre or perspective than an author is used to.

Writers are meant to write from the heart - even ...

What does the picture make you think of? How does it make you feel? How would you describe it? Have you ever imagined something like this before and tried to put it in words? One class I attended at Realm Makers was about self-editing. In the class, Nadine Brandes, the teacher, mentioned that part of the reason an author should learn how to self-edit well is because the imagination is a language between you, the writer, and God. What you are putting on paper is your translation of your imaginati…