Goals and Aspirations in Review – May 2017

I know that I say this every month, but I seriously feel as though May swept out from under me in a few short moments. I have no idea where the time keeps going on me, and it’s more than a little bit frightening for a number of reasons.

So with that pleasant thought in mind, let’s go ahead and delve into what happened throughout the month of May 2017:

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Goal #1. WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE.
I was hoping that May would be a more fruitful month when it came to writing, but as mentioned, the month just flew away from me. It’s amazing how I can go four…five…eight..ten days in a row without writing and not even realize that it happened. I did, however, manage to have a few decent days throughout the month, and amazingly, it was all fiction aside from a single day of blog-writing. Throughout the month I managed to write a combined total of 7054 words, which isn’t my best month so far this year, but not bad, all things considered. Here’s hoping to have a better month in June, though!

Mini-Goal #1.a. Publish more erotic fairy tales.
I’m glad that I didn’t remove this mini-goal in April because I actually made some headway in May! Not only did I complete and publish a second erotic fairy tale, but I also wrote, completed, and published the first in a second series of more supernatural erotic stories. Success! None of the stories are selling particularly well, but it certainly doesn’t hurt me to have them sitting there, just waiting to be found and purchased!

Mini-Goal #1.b. Start writing blog posts again.
I’m not going to spend much time on this one because, to be perfectly blunt, I barely posted any blog posts this month, and they were basically all just sharing videos, so there’s not much to talk about.

Mini-Goal #1.c. Find ways to promote the book(s).
Still working on this one. Still taking suggestions too! This is definitely going to be the worst goal of the year, I’m thinking.

#2. Get healthier.
This is, of course, an ongoing challenge, but I don’t think I did half bad throughout the month of May. I’ve been taking a lot of baby steps. One is dedicating myself to more walking, which we’ll talk about in a moment. Another has been trying to eat better, which is a struggle, no doubt, but I’ve been doing better. I’ve been drinking a lot more water, having fruit-and-yogurt smoothies for breakfast (Jason’s even been drinking them too!) and working hard to eat smaller portions and restrict the amount of junk food I have. I regularly have bad days when I end up gorging on chocolate, but, like I said…baby steps.

Mini-Goal #2.a. Walk/run 10k 8k steps per day.
Well, would you look at this! I can actually report some modicum of success for this goal this month! No, I didn’t walk 8k steps each day throughout May, but I did manage it for 18 of the 31 days, and on top of that, I managed to do an average of 8276 steps per day! That’s the best I’ve done so far this year, so I’m pretty pleased with myself, I must say. Here’s hoping that, by the end of the year I’ll have managed to actually work my way up to 10k per day!

Mini-Goal #2.b. Take daily “me time”.
As I keep explaining, this is a difficult one to keep track of, but I would say May was probably a pretty decent month for this one. I’ve found myself getting used to spending a few minutes a day playing a phone game or watching an episode of one of the shows I love that Jason doesn’t. It’s little stuff, but it helps to keep the stress down a bit.

#3. Work on my online presence – specifically, YouTube.
Another ongoing battle, of course. It’s difficult to quantify how much or how little success I had in May because between time slipping away and my brain being a little bit fuddled this past month, well…you get it. That said, I know for a fact that my subscribers, followers, and so on  have all gone up – if only a little – in the past month, so I’m going to go ahead and say it’s going well enough. 

Mini-Goal #3.a. Learn to respond immediately.
I have a lot of ups and downs with this goal, as I’ve mentioned before, but I believe I’ve been doing a lot better. My weak point seems to be emails, because they always seem to come while I’m out and too busy to respond, but I’m getting much better with the social media stuff, and I’m learning to juggle multiple conversations at once for sure. So put one in the plus column for me!

Mini-Goal #3.b. Focus more on daily social media.
There have been hiccups, but I’m doing a lot better on this one as well. I’m much better with tweets and Facebook than Instagram and Snapchat, but I’m definitely doing a lot better, and I hope it’s helping with the media presence!

Mini-Goal #3.c. Come up with new video ideas.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha….never mind. Just…never mind.

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So that was May! How was your month? Did you get anything accomplished? Do anything cool? Please feel free to share!

The Other World: Book One – Now Available in E-book!

It’s an exciting day, you guys! “The Other World: Book One” is officially available for download as an e-book through Amazon and Kindle! This story is a bit of a baby of mine – something that I’ve written and re-written so many times in the past decade that it’s not even the same story it began as – so it’s super-exciting to finally see it be available online!

If you’re like me and you prefer holding a paperbook copy in your hands, don’t worry, it’s coming in the next couple of weeks! But for you digital-age readers, you can click on the image below to go directly to Amazon where it can be purchased. Don’t forget that if you’re a Kindle Unlimited member you can read for free, and all you need to read is the free Kindle app on any of your smart devices!

I hope you’ll check it out, and if you do, please be sure to rate and/or review. :3 Cheers, readers! ❤

Blogging 101, Day Twenty: Add a New Page

Sometimes you might want to share some information with your readers that you want them to be able to find quickly and easily. For these moments the best option is to create a “Page”, which is why Michelle W. assigns us today to add a new page to your blog, and make sure readers can find it easily.

In a previous assignment we created an “About” page for our readers to learn a little bit more about us. This is the perfect kind of thing to have a separate page for, so that readers can quickly check out this info without having to do an extensive search on our blogs. Other common “Page” ideas? How about a “Links” page to share important websites? Or a “Contact” page to share your alternate online presences and info on how to best reach out to you?

But it’s not just all about the common options. Pages should be tailored to the information that you think is important for your particular blog and your readers. For instance, I have a page set up for information on my projects. As a writer – with followers who are both fellow writers and readers – I thought it would be nice to have an easy and noticable spot on my blog where visitors can check out what I’m working on. Someday when I’m published I’ll create an alternative page with information on my books and where to purchase them. Once I’ve gotten a few more unboxing videos made and uploaded to YouTube I’ll probably create a page that consolodates all the information on those.

It all comes down to figuring out which information is important, and then creating an easily noticable page to reflect that information. Ready? Set? Go!

Blogging 101, Day Ten: Dress Up Your Sidebar

We’ve done a fair bit of personalizing on our blogs so far, and today we’re going to talk about a little bit more, specifically with regard to our “sidebar”. Depending on the theme you chose for your blog, your “sidebar” could be in a number of places, but a rather large number of themes involve said “bar” being either the far right or the far left of your blog. It is a spot where your posts do not reach, an empty slate that you can fill as you so choose. So today’s assignment is to add and/or customize two widgets, one text-based and one image-based.

Now, as with many of these assignments, this is something that I’ve already done since I’ve already been around the block a few times. Therefore, instead of adding or changing anything, I’m going to explain why I chose the widgets that I chose.

The very first widget on my sidebar is a simple photo. I chose that widget because, as a writer, I want people to be able to instantly recognize me. Eventually (based on my own cursed willpower) I will have published books, and those books will have a photo of me inside their covers. If the people who read my books choose to seek out my blog I want them to be able to immediately know that they’ve got the right place. Additionally, a photo is a nice thing to have on a professional blog (not that I think my blog is professional…haha) because it gives visitors that instant feeling of having made your acquaintance, which might help them decide to stick around.

The second widget on my sidebar is an invitation to “Like” my Facebook Author Page. This is a newer addition, as it took me a while to finally decide to actually make a Facebook Author Page. In the end I decided that it was an important step, and the widget reflects that. Facebook is a big deal these days, and while not everyone who stumbles onto my blog may be the kind of person who follows blogs, there are plenty of people out there who might click the “Like” button and thereafter return to my blog as Facebook lets them know what I’ve posted recently.

Thirdly, we have a Twitter widget. I’m not a huge Twitter user myself, but it’s another one of those “important” sites that can be very useful for networking. I chose to add the type of widget that shows the last few things I’ve “tweeted” along with the ability for visitors to tweet directly to me without having to open a whole different browser page to go directly to Twitter.com. Though it is not used as often as I thought it might, I think that it’s nice to give people the ability to speak to me without having to comment on a particular blog post.

The fourth and fifth widgets are organizational in purpose. They simply give visitors the option to browse my blog posts via the full archives, or the categories that I place my posts under.

The sixth widget is a simple “Follow Via Email” button, important for visitors who are neither members of WordPress, nor choose to use the Facebook link.

And the final widget is your basic search which, while not necessarily very useful to visitors, is important for helping me to go back and find things that I wrote about in the past.

Do you see a pattern? Most of my widgets are based around the idea of gathering a following and networking various aspects of my “author platform” together. The widgets I chose are the kinds of widgets that a writer should have in order to effectively use social media to her advantage. However, each individual blogger has to decide for themselves what will work well for their blog. If you’re a private person who wants to talk anonymously you’re probably not going to want to use things like Facebook and Twitter, but if networking is a major part of your platform you might want to add even more social site widgets to your sidebar. If you’re a member of any clubs, challenges, blogging circles, etc, you might want to post your badges on your sidebar. If you’re into any kind of marketing, there are “blog stats” widgets that would help let potential buyers know how popular your blog is. If you hold events via your blog, there are widgets to help you organize and display them. Take a look through all the available widgets and determine what would work best for you. 🙂

Great Expectations: A Published Novel

I’ve been meaning to participate in one of The Daily Post‘s daily prompts for a while now, and this one seemed like an excellent one to start on. The prompt is as follows:

Tell us about one thing (or more) that you promised yourself you’d accomplish by the end of the year. How would you feel once you do? What if you don’t?

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, or if you’ve ever seen any of my “Accountability Wednesday” posts, you probably already know the answer. I have four goals for the year 2014, and of those four the most important one is to completely finish and publish my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

Look! I’ve already got the cover made up!

My other goals are are important to me as well, but this is the one that I feel I must accomplish, even when I don’t feel at all like working on it. A little while back I officially decided (if only in my own mind) that I am going to self-publish this, my first ever novel. I did a lot of research and weighed a lot of pros and cons, and what really brought me to a decision was the timing. For the past few years zombies have been kind of a big thing – there are tons of movies, books, TV shows, and video games that have taken advantage of that trend. But that zombie love is on the downward trend. If you want to jump on the zombie bandwagon, the time to do so is fading, and fast. And that’s why traditional publishing isn’t really an option. Even if I did manage to snag a contract with one of the big publishers, it could take months or years to do so (since many publishers insist that they be given exclusive chance to check out your manuscript before ultimately rejecting it), and even after all of that the traditional publishing market is extremely slow. If even half of the sources that I’ve read are telling a quarter of the truth, even after scoring a contract you can expect to wait years for an actual physical copy of your book to be printed. In all that time, zombies could easily become the last thing in the world that people care to read about.

Thus, it’s self-publishing for me, at least this time. But even with that decision made, I still have to, you know…finish the manuscript. I’ll give myself a few props: the story is written, edited, and beta-read. What I’m currently struggling with is the last set of edits, which includes a couple of small revisions that I’ve been struggling to get myself to work on. The problem, I think, is that while I believe these changes will make the story better overall, I also dread actually having to make them because I’ve never done such a thing before. In the past, when I’ve decided that something in one of my stories required changing, I would – though it’s outrageously counter-productive – re-write the entire thing. I’m not sure why, but I find it extremely difficult to change something in the middle of the story. I can change it as I approach it, via a complete rewrite, but actually going into a chapter in the middle of a story and taking stuff out in order to put other stuff in…somehow the process eludes me. It’s like novel surgery, and I haven’t been properly trained.

And yet, I’ve sworn to myself that it is going to be done, and while I’ve given myself the year, I would really like to see it done by October so that I can promote sales for Halloween.

How will I feel once I’ve done it? Outrageously good. Productive. Like an entrepreneur. Accomplished. I’ll feel like a real author.

If I don’t get it done? Well, let’s just go ahead and not find out, okay? Okay.

Things NOT to Ask Writers

When we are children there are literally a million ways to strike up a friendship, from asking to borrow a crayon to walking up and poking another kid you’ve never met in the back of the head. Kids are simple that way. Adults are trickier because we rely mostly on polite conversation to suss out some information on each other. We ask common questions that everyone can answer with a relative amount of ease, and one of those questions is inevitably, “What do you do for a living?”

Now, since I have a day job that is completely unrelated to writing, I’ve rarely had to experience the frustration that follows as one grits their teeth, struggles to keep their eye from twitching, and grudgingly admits, “I’m a writer.” I have, however, heard many horror stories and had a few minor experiences myself as a result of people actually catching me in the midst of writing. “Horror stories?” you may ask. Yes, horror stories. Because, the thing is, for reasons I’ll never quite understand, when people discover a writer they immediately plunge into a torrent of questions, many of which are extremely rude and annoying. It’s a strange thing, as though the profession of “writer” is automatically up for intense scrutiny.

Most writers will clench their jaw and try their best to answer the onslaught of questions with a smile plastered on their face, even though on the inside they’re screaming. So on behalf of my fellow writers, I present to the rest of you a list of questions to avoid and why we hate it when you ask them.

Haha, very funny Google. You’re not helping.

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“You’re a writer? So, you don’t work then?” or “Oh, that’s cool, but what’s your real job?”

I’ll never understand this myself, but unless you’re an extremely well-known author like Stephen King, or you work as a screenwriter for a popular TV show, people don’t seem to consider writing to be a “real” job. Correct me if I’m wrong, fellow artists, but I feel like writing is the only one of the arts to enjoy this stigma. There’s just something about writing in particular that makes people imagine that it can be a hobby, but not a career.

So let me clear things up: writing is as much a job as anything else. It entails a lot of hard work (more on that later), and if you want to be good at it you have to spend a boatload of time on training, research, practice, keeping up with business trends, networking with peers and important possible business contacts, and, oh yeah…the actual writing.

Just because something sounds fun and easy doesn’t mean that it is, and just because what someone chooses to do with their life isn’t a 9-to-5 with a regular bi-weekly paycheck and benefits doesn’t mean that it isn’t a job.

“What’s your story about?”

Non-writers, I know you think this question shows polite interest, but the question itself is an ignorant over-simplification. This question implies that an intricately woven tapestry of characters, setting, and plot line – something that may have taken months or years to construct – can be easily explained in a couple of sentences. But trust me, non-writers, it is no easier to give a brief description of what we’re writing than it is for a mathematician to explain calculus to someone who has never done it before. It makes us sweat, because we’re caught between making our story sound stupid (“Uh…um…it’s about zombies.”) or putting you in the position of listening to the entire life story of the novel so that you understand what it’s truly about.

If you’re honestly curious about what the writer is writing, a better question would be, “What kind of genres do you write in?” or “Are you working on anything special right now?” If the writer wants to talk about their current work-in-progress, questions like these will pave the way and let them know that you’re actually interested, not just being facetious.

“Have you made any money writing?” or “How much do you make writing?”

For the life of me I’ll never get why people think that this is an okay road to go down. With pretty much any other profession on the planet it is considered extremely rude to ask someone how much money they make (unless you’re already good friends and are comfortable with that kind of sharing), and yet people are constantly asking this of writers. It not only comes off as rude and nosy, but it immediately gives off the impression of disbelief in the writer’s ability to earn a living, which is much, much more than rude.

Do everyone involved a favor, non-writers, and just never bring money up. It’s none of your business and it can come to no good.

“Can I read your book before you publish it?”

No. No, no, no, no, no. There are so many things wrong with this request, but I’ll go with the one that everyone (hopefully) should be able to understand: something for nothing. Would you ask an architect to design a building for free? Would you ask a doctor to do surgery for free? Would you ask an electrician to wire a house for free? The answer in every case is a resounding NO, because it is ridiculous to ask someone to use their time, energy, education, and experience to do something for you for free. It is no different to ask a writer to let you read something (for free!) that you know damn well they’re trying to earn a living with. If you’re really that interested to read, go out and buy the damn book.

“Do you really expect to make a living as a writer?”

Here’s the thing…you can take any highly successful profession on the planet and there will be people who failed miserably at it. Young people with excellent GPAs will flunk out of med school because they can’t handle the pressure. Incredibly intelligent lawyers may fall apart on the stands because they’re no good at public speaking. Genius engineers may make a tiny mistake in their calculations that end up costing companies millions.

I get that the artistic fields (art, writing, music, acting…) are extremely difficult to break into and that the idea of the “starving artist” is a thing for a reason. But that does not give you the right to talk down to a writer because you think their ambitions are too high. Unless you are this particular writer’s parent and you’ve got them bumming in your house rent-and-bill-free, it is absolutely none of your business how they choose to spend their time and whether or not they’re going to be able to survive as a writer.

“Do you really think that self-publishing is the way to go?” or “But you’re not really a real author until you’ve been properly published, right?”

First of all, non-writers, I’m willing to bet that the majority of you don’t know much more about publishing than it’s how books are printed. Therefore, I forgive you for not realizing that there have been enormous shifts in the publishing paradigm in recent years. I forgive you for not knowing that trying to get traditionally published these days is like trying to convince the judges at a dog show to let you enter your cat in the competition. I forgive you for not being privy to the fact that traditional publishing can take so long that your book’s topic may no longer be marketable by the time you’ve gotten it in print. I’ll even forgive you for not being aware that many, many very successful writers have been self-publishing in recent years as trends shift and they realize that self-publishing allows them the ability and freedom to control more of the creative process, distribution, and marketing than ever before.

What I will not forgive you for is asking questions like these when you know damn well that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Do your research first, and then maybe we’ll be willing to have a nice, sit-down conversation about the virtues of each method of publishing.

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I could keep going, but those non-writers who are reading this right now are probably already frowning at their screen and coming up with counter-arguments for why I shouldn’t be so uptight and just be happy that they’re interested enough to ask questions in the first place. So with that I conclude my list of super-frustrating inquiries and open up the floor to my fellow writers. How about it, guys and gals? What questions do you just hate to be asked as a writer?

A Need for Nonsense

When I was quite young, still in the elementary school years, I used to write like mad. I had notebooks and notebooks full of stories and I was rarely ever without pen and paper. But as I grew and other things began to be important to me, my writing dwindled down to nothing. By the time I hit high school I was barely even writing at all.

Then my best friend and I began a strange collaboration. It started because of a particular English teacher who I loathed. My best friend and I used to jokingly plot crazy ways to be rid of this particular teacher (it’s not as creepy as it sounds, I swear, and besides, she deserved it), and somehow or other it became a super-short little story. I honestly can’t remember which one of us wrote the first chapter, but I remember that it was only about a page long, featured ridiculously overblown explosions, and ended with my boyfriend and I being pursued by the police. It was an incredibly goofy, over-the-top little piece of flash fiction that would have made little to no sense when taken out of context, but it started something.

You see, at the time that this strange little story first came to light, my friend and I shared a keyboarding class. For you youngsters, that was a classroom full of typewriters – not computers, mind you, but honest-to-goodness typewriters – where a teacher would run us through exercises to learn how to type properly (you know, with your fingers on the right keys and without looking at your hands). Since my friend and I were already rather good at typing, we would often finish our assigned tasks quickly, and thus we took to spending the remainder of our classes adding to our little story. She would type up a page-long “chapter”, and then I would type one. Back and forth, back and forth.

The thing is, there was absolutely nothing sensible about this story we were collaborating on. The cast quickly ballooned to include my best friend and her beau, two other friends and a boy one of them had a crush on, and a random goofy guy from my best friend’s science class (who, funny story, wound up becoming my husband). This motley crew of eight went on lunatic adventures to stay ahead of the police, and that adventure got more and more bewildering as it went on. Among some of the more outlandish plot points were an armada of flying enemy pizza-minis who were destroyed by being sprayed with donair sauce, alien cows who could disguise themselves to look like humans, and the use of such devices as a SRMLD (Stark Raving Mad Lunatic Detector. Since one of the first pages of the story involved one of the characters accidentally blowing up the planet, we called it “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, and filled the thing with so many terrible in-jokes that reading it now makes me twitch a little.

A snapshot of one page of the original copy. At the time this seemed like the height of humorous dialogue.

And here’s the point of this little trip down memory lane…Our story was utterly foolish. It had numerous spelling and grammatical errors. It had no discernible plot, and certainly no semblance of act structure. It was complete and utter nonsense that would mean absolutely zip to anyone other than myself and my friend. It was nothing that could ever be shared with the world in any way. And it was fun. It was ridiculously fun and it started me writing again.

There’s a moral here, and that moral is that writing doesn’t always have to have a purpose. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It doesn’t have to be publishable, or even readable. You can have goals and deadlines and lots of writerly responsibilities, but you can have fun too. You can write silly, meaningless nonsense every now and then. You can write whatever foolishness pops into your head just because it’s in there and you’d like to get it out. I think that’s something that a lot of writers forget. They focus all of their time and energy into writing words that can be sold, or used for marketing or promotional purposes, and they forget why they got into writing in the first place.

Writing can absolutely be your career, but it is also something that writers do because we enjoy it, because we love it, and it’s important to remember that. After all, we all know what “all work and no play” did to a famous fictional writer.

Kudos, Amazon. Kudos.

I’m not the type of person who pays a lot of attention to the news. For good or ill, most of my knowledge of what’s going on in the world around me comes from secondary sources (i.e. wherever I happen to be hanging out on the internet that day). So it was whilst browsing through some other blogs on WordPress that I happened to stumble across the news that Amazon is going to be paying authors to publish fan fiction.

People…I am beyond stoked about this, not because I think it might benefit me personally, but because it opens up a whole new world for writers who managed to put together excellent stories about characters who just happen to be copyright protected. Publishing fan fiction has been around for ages of course (what, did you think that the hundreds of Star Wars novels out there were all written by George Lucas?), but it has tended to be a very difficult world to get into. Amazon is going to widen that world, make it more accessible. They have garnered the rights to gather and publish fan fiction novels based on three popular television series (Gossip Girls, The Vampire Diaries, and Pretty Little Liars), and it is my hope and belief that this list will grow exponentially in the future. This could present a huge opportunity for the thousands upon thousands of fans out there who have put great time and effort into their previously-doomed-to-never-be-published works. Of course, there are quite a lot of fans out there who have neither the skills nor the natural talent to write something that Amazon will consider publishing, but just the idea that this is now a real opportunity is amazing to me. Just think…someday soon you could write an amazing novel based on some of your all-time favorite characters and actually make money from it!

As a fangirl of many things myself, I really have to say, I’m pretty damn excited.

What do you think about this new development? Do you think it’s going to fly? Will it be a good thing or a bad thing for fan fiction writers? Please share!

Mythologically Speaking

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

46. Myths about writers

There are a hell of a lot of myths out there about writers and writing in general. Do a quick Google search and you’ll be bombarded by everything from stereotypes about people who write, to complete BS about how publishing “really” works. I’ve plucked out a few particular ones that I hear quite often and thus feel that I can comment on them.

1. All writers are insane.
Obviously this one is a generalization, but it does actually have some basis in truth. Writers do tend to be a little…off the deep end…but that’s just because of the overwhelming mixture of creativity and passion. Here me out: writers have all this creativity in them, all these stories that need to come out, and there’s a desperate passion to make that happen. But putting a story to paper is a lot more difficult and time-consuming than non-writers think. In order to put that story down you have to give up things…time, sleep, a social life…and you’ve got to be at least a little bit insane to do that.

2. If you’re talented, you’ll get published.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The only other myth that’s as far off the scale as this one is “you’ll never get published without natural talent”. In a perfect world the talented writers would get all the publishing contracts and the no-talent hacks would never get anywhere near a published book. But this isn’t a perfect world. Unfortunately wonderful stories will get overlooked for a number of reasons, the least of which is not a publisher’s desire to publish what is currently “popular”. Publishers are like any other business…they’re in it to make money, and if they get a wonderfully-written fantasy epic and a crudely-written vampire-porn, they’re probably going to publish the vampire-porn because that happens to be what’s “in” right now.

3. All you need is an idea: the rest will come easily
Oh my laughable lord, no. I don’t think anyone really understands the writing process until they’ve done it, but as with everything else in life people will always talk about what they don’t understand. Sure, getting an idea for a good story is definitely an important part of the equation, but it is hardly the only variable. For one thing, a plot is nothing without good characters, and good characters need subplots, conflict, and personalities that allow us to relate with them. And even with all that you need a multitude of scenes, tension and climaxes, and a reasonable conclusion, and that’s a lot more difficult to figure out than it sounds. Also, all that isn’t taking into account that you have to find the words, the proper words that make everything sound right. All I’m saying is, try it first, judge the difficulty later.

Caution: Avoid At All Costs

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

43. Mistakes to avoid in manuscripts

My three answers to this prompt are based on personal experience with what I’ve seen people do when submitting excerpts to be critiqued on Critique Circle. If you’re a writer and you’re reading this, feel free to add suggestions of your own in the comments.

– One major thing I notice is that tons of people (at least when they’re looking for critiques) pass along pieces of their work that are drowning in spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. This is a huge turnoff for anyone who is reading the piece, whether it be for critique, editing, or publishing purposes. I know that no one is perfect, definitely not myself, and that mistakes will be made, but when you’re reading a piece and you find ten spelling errors in the first half a dozen sentences, you begin to wonder if the piece was submitted to you by a five-year-old. Additionally, I’m sorry, but if you don’t have a half-decent grasp on grammar and punctuation, you might have to reconsider your field. Again, I know no one is perfect – I myself often feel that I’m putting in way too many commas while also feeling that every single one is justified – but if the person reading your piece is finding at least one mistake in every single sentence, you are absolutely not going to be taken seriously.

– Word abuse is a complaint I’ve come across many times, and I can definitely understand why. Have you ever read a book in which the author seemed obsessed with a few particular words or phrases and used them constantly to the point that it was both noticeable and annoying? I definitely have. It’s not something that any writer does on purpose (at least I don’t believe so), but sometimes there is just a word you enjoy and so it weasels its way into your work over and over again. I myself have a tendency to overuse the word “incredulous”. I don’t know why, but it seems to come up constantly and makes editing a nightmare as I struggle for different words to use to break up the bad habit.

– The dreaded Mary-Sue Effect, or more recently known as the Bella Swan Conundrum. If you’ve never heard of a Mary Sue, it’s a name given to characters who are unnaturally perfect, with no discernible flaws to speak of. These characters are written to be the ideal person, loved by everyone, someone who never makes mistakes and is naturally perfect at everything that matters. These types of characters have existed for a long time, but one of the new pop-culture-reference examples is Bella Swan from the Twilight Saga. Bella is not special in any way, other than for the fact that the psychic vampire Edward Cullen cannot read her mind. And yet, despite her decidedly common nature, she is portrayed as (to put it bluntly) the Center of the Universe. All the male characters love her, except for the ones who think her important enough to want to kill. She is constantly surrounded by danger, drama, and conflict, and she always comes out of it completely unscathed. She succeeds in everything she tries. This is not how a main character should be. Some readers love this kind of character because they like to imagine that they are that character…this is called wish fulfillment, and while it can serve it’s purpose, it is not good literature. Good characters should have flaws. They should make stupid mistakes and suffer for them. They should have to struggle for their successes, and they should have to deal with all the same issues that life throws at all of us. If you want to make a good character, make them real, not ideal.