So I’ve just started on my second MFA class – Advanced Studies in Literature. I was able to finish my first class with an A and it’s nice to know that a decade out of my last degree I can still pull this thing off. My favorite thing about that first intro class was that…
So joining an MFA program has, no surprise, sucked up a lot of my time in the last couple of months, but I think I’m going to try to start sharing out some of what I’m doing in my classes to the blog. This wasn’t technically an assignment, but we’re talking a lot about workshopping…
Since writers write it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of them do some of that writing on the internet, and thank goodness for that. Multiple times in the process of self-publishing my book I’ve had questions that no one in my real life, however intelligent or well intentioned, could have answered for me, but…
The paperback version of my book Rell is now available. It took some last minute graphic design wrangling with the cover (3mm has never been so frustrating), but it’s now officially out there in the world. There’s still a lot of things I want to keep doing for it in terms of promotion and just…
The paperback formatting was definitely the hardest practical part of the self-publishing process. It gave me a whole new respect for copy editors, book designers, and I can’t even imagine the skill it would have taken to create these things before the computer era. It made me feel grateful to live in an era where…
For six years I’ve had an item near the top of my yearly to do list – publish Rell. The ebook is now available through Amazon – it’s taken so much work to get this far, and even if it sells 3 copies I’m so excited and a little proud of myself that I’ve finally…
So tonight I officially have the ebook version of my first novel Rell all formatted, loaded, and ready to rock on Amazon. All I have to do is hit the “publish” button and it will be live. I’m holding off because I think I can have the hardcopy (paperback) formatting finished within the next week.…
I’ve been hesitant to post about this – because I said this last year and then hit a giant roadblock, but…if I keep on track with my “last read through” goals, my novel Rell will be fully ebook formatted and ready to rock by the end of this week. I’ve tentatively set a publishing date…
One challenge I seem to have in the last few years is consistent momentum. I’ll have a few days where I scribble like crazy in a notebook and set a bunch of goals, and then…. More and more I’m becoming convinced that the secret to doing anything, especially if you want to do it well,…
Editing some of my writing today and here are two revelations about myself – Apparently I’m perfectly happy to use the Oxford comma in my fiction – but I’m always reluctant to use semi-colons. They just feel pretentious to me – I’m not even sure why. I always want to use a comma before I…
Jenel Alan 