Newest Release ~ For New Writers

Do you struggle with developing characters? Try this guidebook.

One of the hardest things to do in writing

is to create characters that readers will care about,

that will make them have to read on.

Noah Luke

Discovering Characters is like investigating a house we want to buy.

No, I’m serious. Characters have an exterior façade that we comment upon as we drive past. Through the windows we catch glimpses of interior lives.

Even in cookie-cutter boxy cliques, characters have individual characteristics, just as the suburbia ranch houses have their garden plantings and the urban row houses have their painted doorways. 

These small touches create individual homes in neighborhoods.

Some characters enjoy the bright city lights. Some are loners, nestled against a national forest.  Characters, houses—each have individual personalities. Some are blingie, with the latest décor while others enjoy the comfort of yoga pants and old sneakers.

As writers, we capture these individual characters and save them from the cookie-cutter boxy stereotypes. We delve into interior rooms for glimpses of formative baggage. Finding their backstory is a search through attics and cellars, storage closets and garages. Characters hide their pain and fears, painting them over and adding distracting artwork.

Our job as writers is to find every detail of our characters then use snippets so our readers will see our characters as they drive through our books. We hint at the foundations while opening doors to their plans and purposes.

Discovering Characters is designed to help writers find the exteriors and interiors, public and private. We’ll dig around the foundations and climb to the roof. We’ll explore the open rooms and the storage closets. We’ll peek into rooms inhabited by such characters as diverse as Elizabeth and Darcy, the Iron Man, Aragorn and Frodo, Travis McGee, Medea, Macbeth, and Nanny McPhee.

Five areas comprise this guidebook. Just as characters—and houses—are individual, this info is individual. You won’t need every bit. Dip in and out, skim around. When you reach locked rooms, come back and explore to discover the keys to your characters.

1.      Starting Points ~ offering templates and character interviews

2.      Classifications ~ common and uncommon ways of discovering characters

3.      Relationships ~ couples, teams, allies, enemies, mentors, etc.

4.      Special Touches ~ progressions, transgressions, and transitions for character arcs

5.      Significant Lists ~ archetypal characters and much more

Discovering Characters, with 44,000-plus words, is the second book in the Discovering set, part of the Think like a Pro Writer series for writers new to the game as well as those wanting to up their game.

Get it here!

Writer M.A. Lee has been indie-publishing fiction and non-fiction since 2015. She has over 25 books published under her pseudonyms. Visit www.writersinkbooks.com to discover more information.

The Hazard for Spies ~ Cover Reveal

It's the first look at the next cover!

The Hazard for Spies is book 11 in the Hearts in Hazard 12-book series.

The end is near!

Happy 1st Birthday ~ 2 * 0 * 4 Lifestyle

Luke 10:27 "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength and with all your soul."

We're a whole person, not just the physical, but all the diets and exercise that people focus on makes us think we're only physical beings.

How would it be to have a planner that reminds you to focus on all four aspects of your self?

Your Relationships with Others


Your Intellectual Growth

Your Diet and Exercise (especially the new Keto / Fasting focuses)

Your Spiritual Connection with God

2 * 0 * 4 is designed to help you keep re-charging those connections and tracking them throughout the year, with progress meters, habit trackers, reviews and previews, and planning charts galore.

7 covers for each individual taste.

Cityscape

Tea Time

Floral

Woodland

English Cottage

Meadow

Mountain Stream

Here are a three sample pages.

What more could you want?

A great deal on Amazon, still only $12.00 (that's a buck a month). And NOW is the time to be thinking about your plans for next year! Before the holidays start hitting and you've too many distractions!

Start Writing: How-To

A former student texted with a question about how to start writing. I texted back--which turned into a really loooooonnnnnnngggg text.

And which I expanded for the September Blog Posts for the Writers Ink nonfiction website. Have a read.

Recommended: Pro Writing Software

I love MS Word.

This love comes out because I just endured several days of Mac people bashing MS / pc people as if the Apple world is divine.

It's good. Sometimes it's even great. Divine? Nyah.

Try 25 years with MS Word.

First "computer" I ever used for word processing had DOS. Remember DOS? DIR to find your files. C: and the blinking cursor on a black screen. Yeah. Those days.

Then came Windows! And the world never looked back.

I’ve used MS Word about 25 years and changed as it changed. Mac, didn’t love so much in the early days. Once I shifted to pc, I never returned to Mac (except for the iPhone, which I hate for its planned obsolescence [which intuitive spelling keeps changing to “insolence”—is that telling me something?] and box-tight control of what it wants me to do.)

Over the years with Microsoft and other electronic devices I learned to avoid the shiny new and wait for later iterations. I avoided Vista and all of its crashes. Since I had to buy a new system around ‘10, I jumped past that issue. Not having Vista on the system prevented the crashes that most people had with it that continued to 8.

I also learned, from watching people trying to bring work from home that wasn’t compatible with the work software programs as well as listening to people complain, that anything labeled “Home” wasn’t worth the price. I’ve purchased professional- or work-level software from that point.

You get what you pay for. 

Last year, with all the viruses and malware and ransom ware and more that was going on, I took a hard look at keeping my security and programs updated. That’s the primary reason that I subscribed to Windows Office 365. I didn’t want the constant hassle.

I’m not a lover of any big corporate entity. I hate monopolies. I hate algorithms that try to shove me into one box when I’ve got fingers in 10 different ones and toes into a few others. But MS treats its products and customers professionally, and that’s what I want. (And I certainly don’t want any entity adding things I didn’t ask for—the way Apple added that U2 album without my permission to iTunes on my computer.) 

I can make Word and PowerPoint do pretty much everything I ask them to do. It’s easy to flip between the programs using the task bar at the bottom of the screen. I lust after those widescreen monitors that allow two screens (3! even) to be open at once. But I’m too thrifty to add the monitor when my magnified glasses and laptop work fine 

.

Remember Windows 3.1.0.2? Loved that program. Loved the mouse interface that beat keyboard commands (CTRL + C). Loved the advent of wysiwyg printers (what you see is what you get).

Change is always happening. Who said that? Herodotus?

Okay. Rant over. Only it’s more like the homily for the day. :) 

Just Published ~ The Hazard of Secrets

I just published The Hazard of Secrets, book 10 in the Hearts in Hazard series of English Regency mysteries.

This is the book that became ever-expanding, blowing past the original length of 55,000 words, climbing on to 78,000 words, and then achieving 109,000 words.

I kept thinking about dividing it out, but events at the beginning cause events in the middle and connect to events at the end.

Discover more here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XDQTS2N/