There is no drama quite like family drama. Because of the blood ties, your characters will often have a vested interest in his or her family members and vice versa. If you are stuck in a scene or looking from some way to get the characters of your story to move in the directions you want them to, then throw in a little family drama. Whether they bow down and do what their family members want or they hire a family lawyer Dallas office to fight for their cause, you can be certain your character won’t stand still for long.
Sell Books With a Book Contest
April 18th, 2012 
Arwen Taylor Do you want people in your social networks talking about your new book? Host a book contest! With the right prizes, this promotional tactic can generate book sales, blog subscribers, Twitter followers, or Facebook fans (or all of the above).
Book contests are easy to implement and inexpensive, and they offer wonderful opportunities for you to connect with your readers and those who should become your readers. They also give your friends and fans an opportunity to “introduce” you to their networks.
Here are a few guidelines to get you started:
Decide what you want to accomplish. The contest goal is important because it helps you structure the contest and establish rules. When Barbara Techel hosted a recent contest to promote “Class Act: Sell More Books Through School and Library Author Appearances,” she wanted people to buy the book, but she also wanted to generate more authors as Twitter followers because they’re the book’s target audience. Other common contest goals include increasing the number of blog subscribers and Facebook fans or generating pre-publication orders.
Writing Prompt: The Inciting Incident
April 18th, 2012 Arwen Taylor In every story there is an event that sets a character on the plot path you have designed for him or her. This is called the inciting incident. It is what causes the person to deviate from his or her normal life. For example, a person loses his or her job and decides to start a pest control Hanover Park company. The inciting incident is the job loss which prompts the person to make a career change. Your goal with this writing prompt is to brainstorm inciting incidents that cause the characters in your stories to go in different directions, such as developing a pest control Hanover Park company, in their lives.
The New Literary Democracy: Differentiating The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
April 18th, 2012 Arwen Taylor They say that 82% of Americans would like to write a book. Tens of thousands of them do. The vast majority of the books that are flooding into the muddled market space of independent publishing are read only by the author and the author’s mother. This is the Gutenberg revolution on steroids. Anyone with the will to write can upload their books on Amazon, Smashwords and Createspace, to name only a few, for free and have instant global distribution. Of course, like all mass processes, no one is going to notice that you book is even there without some intervening process.
The question on the minds of most in the literary world is – is this massive flow of written words competing for attention a good thing?
There can be no doubt that the former literary establishment that used to dominate the publication of the written word like haughty aristocrats denied all too many worthy voices the right to be heard and be considered by society at large. The best book ever written in Twentieth Century may very well be rotting in a three-ring binder in a landfill having been discarded by its frustrated author many years ago. In the bourgeois era of literature, it was not good enough to be an excellent author, you had to be connected, or by some miracle be noticed by an industry insider, if you ever hoped to find an audience. There was simply no other way to get distribution. One has to wonder how many voices of sheer genius were shut out in the cold never to be heard.
Writing Prompt: Dealing with Illness
April 10th, 2012 Arwen Taylor Every good writer knows that adversity helps characters grow and learn. A good way to get characters to learn about themselves and the world around them is to have them deal with an illness. You can have them suffer from something serious like cancer or have a more innocuous health problem like a cold. Putting your characters through the paces of getting diagnosed and seeking treatment, like black mold treatment for example, is a good way to show readers who the person is deep inside. If your character’s development has fizzled out or they just don’t seem to be learning the lessons you need them to, make them sick. Literally.
