Angie's Place

Coaching? Mentoring?

Are you good at what you do? Do you want to get better at it? Then you need a coach: someone who is skilled in specific tasks. Athletes, singers, pageant contestants all use personal coaches. The coach is charged with the responsibility of analyzing and correcting form, skill, and pushing their clients to success. Even businesses have coaches to create standardized procedures or leap financial walls.

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Loree's Lough Down

Everybody Loves Free Stuff … Right?

Lately, while leading workshops and teaching classes, chatting with fellow authors at book signings, and just plain commiserating with writer pals, someone eventually mentions the publishing industry’s latest sales tactic: free downloads of our books to Nook and Kindle owners. Once that proverbial door is open, it’s a pretty sure bet that someone else will ask, “How can we ‘up’ our sales stats if publishers keep giving our books away?”

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At the Movies

Hunger Games

Based on my youngest child’s recommendation, I read the first book of The Hunger Games trilogy and was enthralled with Suzanne Collins’s post-apocalyptic story of Katniss Everdeen and her quest to stay alive in a strange, Survivor-type reality show where she and twenty-three other competitors fight to the death. That may not be much of a recommendation to a Christian audience, but the story is a compelling struggle between good and evil, where good wins out.

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How NOT To Get Published

The ABCs of Writing, Part 2

It’s a new month filled with new opportunities. So let’s dispense with my normal foolishness (the editor just did a cartwheel) and pick up where we left off last month. Ideas. Those things nonwriters often ask where you found them. Hence, those things you must find in order to write. (And yes . . . they generally come from your head, though that’s not the answer readers really want to hear.)

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