That said, the average comic book fan or aspiring artist may not have much faith that their nerdy pastime could be worth millions of dollars. After all, it’s challenging breaking into an already-saturated industry, especially if you don’t have much experience. But if you think about your hobby as a business, and…
So, I might be short and to the point here. Mostly because I know I’m going to get a pretty big workout in the comments. My opinion has also been stated here a few times, but I felt like bringing up the topic once more.
One of the most interesting things that I’ve noticed over the last year is that there is a lot of shame attached to mental illness. Some by the sufferer and others by those who think they are helping. I’ve always wondered why this is, but it feels more or more like the stigmas are built into society. Don’t let them know you see a therapist. Why? Because you’ll never get a job, get married, have kids, or be able to do anything. Never reveal that you’re on medications. Why? Because you’ll never get a job, get married, have kids, or be able to anything. It’s like people with mental illness are being asked to ‘not be who they are’, which makes the problem infinitely worse. Imagine struggling with anxiety and then being told that your anxiety will cause all these problems, so you need to hide it. Now, you’re anxious about revealing that you’re anxious. It’s just emotionally and mentally destructive.
Now, I mentioned therapy and medication in there too. The strangest thing is that these are actions that show an intent to get a handle on one’s illness. Yet, we use them as marks of shame. People who go in for chemo or have to use an inhaler for asthma aren’t treated like this. The reason might be because those are physical diseases, which are easier to wrap our heads around than mental. I wonder if there’s a fear when it comes to mental illness too. A person might push for someon to get better quickly because then it means it isn’t that big a deal if they themselves have one. There’s no infection when it comes to these things, but helping a person with severe mental illness can trigger ones in the helper if they are stressed too much. If you can convince a person to get over their depression then maybe you can do it too in the future. This is ridiculous, of course.
Honestly, I’m just throwing ideas out there because I really can’t see the point in stigmatizing mental illness. Especially these days when you have the Internet and more connections than ever. It’s easier to trigger a breakdown because of some jackass online or to indulge in certain harmful activities. If anything, society should be pushing for these issues to be brought to the light and teach more people about them. Maybe have a time in high school where students learn about things like depression, anxiety, etc. and get to share their thoughts. Make it a discussion class and try to eliminate the stigma with the younger generations. Just a thought, which has some downsides because you don’t want to upset anyone who is currently suffering.
Anyway, what do you think about the mental illness stigma?
As audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment in publishing, I have been researching that market. One thing I realized is that choosing a narrator is probably the most important decision you make when you turn your book into an Audiobook. People who love audiobooks may buy your audiobook because they like your work, your genre, your cover, or your price. When they actually start listening to your audiobook however, one of the most important factors to decide whether they’ll continue listening to the end, is the quality of the reading.
So, how do you choose the right voice? Leaving out the financial aspects (if you can afford to pay the narrator the fee he is asking for or if you choose a royalty scheme), there are a few issues to take into consideration, from “demographics” to acting performance. Here are a few tips.
Much like the previous week, this one kind of a blurred. Things happened on Monday that felt like they occured months ago by the time I hit Friday. Not that it wasn’t fun since they had this week long Battle of the Classes event. So there were activities all over the place and a few alterations to the schedule. My evenings weren’t any more relaxing since I had a lot of stuff going on at night. Might as well get into that.
I do feel bad that I can’t make the long, detailed goal posts from way back when. I hope to get back there at some point, but it isn’t right to publicly talk about some aspects of my job and that life event is still going on. The weather is starting to warm up and we changed the clocks in the bad direction (lost an hour) too. Both of those things tend to throw me off, so the combination left me drained by night. I did a few blog posts for the future including one on mental health for tomorrow. My energy was really lacking, so I tended to crawl into bed and turn on Netflix around 9 or 9:30. Finished watching ‘Daredevil Season 2’ and am starting ‘JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’. Not sure what to think about that second one since I’ve only seen one episode. It’s . . . Bizarre really is the right word.
You might notice that I didn’t say anything about writing. Sadly, I couldn’t fit any in because of the busy schedule. I kept finding that I was out of something and had to do late evening grocery runs. My biking was delayed until 8 PM a few nights and my son had two late nights as well. Had to take care of taxes as well. Last weekend was when I got a chapter done, but it was a slog because of a rough Saturday night. Not sure what happened, but I wasn’t feeling well and that threw me off for a few days. It’s amazing and frustrating how one night of bad sleep can derail you for a while. Probably becuase it’s really hard to counter it, especially when you wake up at 5:30 in the morning. You need to either sacrifie a weeknight or push to the weekend.
Sadly, I don’t see much writing this weekend either. Tomorrow has a morning appointment right in the middle of the time when my son is out, which means I can’t do anything. Then, I have to get a haircut and get myself looking presentable for an interview next week. School isn’t in session during the summer, so I’m hoping to get a camp job. No rest for . . . whatever I am. Maybe I’ll get some writing in at night, but I’m thinking it might be more blog posts. Locking April in will be helpful, especially since I’ll have a length of time to write when Spring Break hits. Not much, but maybe 3 chapters will get done. I do need to use my writing weekends better to get 2 chapters done instead of 1, but it depends on energy.
I have to admit that these long breaks between writing sessions have me worried. I’m used to digging in and working hard during the week then taking time off on the weekend. That’s only a 1-2 day break, but now I’m looking at 2 weeks at times. My fear is that the continuity is shot and that I’m not remembering things. It’s frustraing and aggravating after years of being fairly prolific. Maybe things will improve in April when a few activities end and the schedules loosen up. If I can get even 2 sections written during the week then I’ll be okay. Considered becoming a Word Count author too, but the one time I had to stop in the middle of a section drove me up the wall. Took me 15 minutes to get back into the flow as well.
The lack of sales and questioning the usefulness of Twitter hasn’t helped my mood. Does anybody get anything out of Twitter? I schedule one post for every day and then I pin it after I wake up. I get a lot of retweets, but it’s clear that sales aren’t coming from there. I think I might make it one post every week unless I have a new book to promote. Maybe I’ll have this be a post for next Sunday to get opinions. Social media in general doesn’t appear to be helping me and I don’t count blogging in that category.
Can’t think of anything big going on next week, so I can’t talk about it. Tomorrow is a big day with us seeing ‘Wonder Park’ and hopefully beating that T.M.N.T. arcade game. Then it’ll be a lazy afternoon/evening, which isn’t a bad thing. Sorry that we’re hitting the boring part of my life. I’d like to talk about work, but being a one-on-one T.A. means I do a lot of things that are personal to my student. What kind of teacher would I be if I threw their life onto the Internet? Seeing as I spend most of my time there, the subject matter here is rather scarce. Let’s just get to the goals:
Hi everyone, my name is Tineke and I am an author. No really, an honest to God author. What makes an author? Writing. Writing anything that makes slightly sense and you are a writer. In my book, a writer and author are the same thing. According to some you need to be published to be an author.
Now I am published. Am I a writer or an author? Both!
I love animals and have been taking care of them for as long as I can remember. From hedgehogs to all sorts of birds. Kittens that were dropped off in a box somewhere ended up in our house when I was young. Thanks to me mostly.
At a certain point in my 36 years, I decided I wanted to take care of wild animals and ended up studying Biological science in England. Due to the stress of such a course, I…
This is another post where I wrote down the topic and wasn’t really sure where I was going with it. ‘New versions of characters’ can mean so many things, but I knew it had to do with War of Nytefall: Rivalry. After all, I’m starting the hype up for that. So, what could this be about?
Well, I can’t say exactly because I have the actual scene set to be a teaser later in the month. It involves a character from Legends of Windemeremaking a cameo and I can already sense that I need to clarify something. The events of War of Nytefall take place a couple hundred years prior to the other series, so now you can get an idea of who might make an appearance. Either a god or some other kind of immortal, but this did bring up a dilemma. Do I have this character show up looking the same or different?
Well, there was an easier answer here since this character shares an odd ‘origin’ with Clyde, but I still got to thinking about reusing old characters. It can be a little nerve-wracking because you don’t want to damage what you’ve already created. I’ve talked at least once about the challenge and danger of prequels, which this feeds into because you could simply leave the characters alone. Worlds are big places, so I don’t have to have cameos when I write another Windemere series. Sure, Mab showed up in The Mercenary Prince, but that was really more of a ‘test run’ for the Dawn Fangs as main characters. It wasn’t a prequel, so now I’m just establishing how she got to that point. Only issue here is that I make it clear she survives and go entirely off topic from what I should be writing about.
The physical design of a character is locked into their persona mythos, so you can’t do much if you want to change them. The core/basics need to be maintained or people will wonder simply why you didn’t make someone new. You can have them age and maybe change the style in some fashion, but the audience expects certain tells. For example, Nyx will always need to have black hair, her amethyst necklace, and usually have some fire-like connection. Changing those around turns her into someone else, which isn’t that different than reality. All of us have identifiers that make us who we are regardless of how old we get, so it isn’t surprising to find that characters will be the same. That’s part of what I was thinking when I made the handful of cameos in my series.
Now, I do use the word ‘versions’ in the title and that’s because I did make a younger ‘version’ of the character in question. Those identifiers are there, but it’s obvious that the personality isn’t what it is when you first meet them. It’s less mature, which makes sense considering the hundreds of years between the series. Did I put a lot of thought into how this is done? Probably not as much as I should have, but I considered this cameo for years, so it might have simply been spread out over time. That doesn’t make me feel any more relaxed about it, especially since I may have marked it happening in 3 books because I kept forgetting where it was supposed to go. Oops. Glad I solved that problem before I published any of them.
So, what do you think about introducing new versions of old characters? I know I didn’t touch on it that clearly, but maybe we’ll get further in the comments.
Hi, gang. Craig here again, and this Friday assignment is a writing question. It’s kind of an audience participation thing, so I hope we can engage in the comments.
This is a favorite game of authors everywhere. Let’s cast the movie to go along with our novels. I used to get more performers a few years ago. I still get them, but maybe experience has dampened some of this mental activity when I write.
The first time it happened to me, Linda Hunt insisted on taking over the character of Aunt Natalie in Panama. She was the keeper of all the secret agent type weapons, and provided the train the Marshals used once they got to Panama.
I’ll play honestly with one I’ve never given much thought to. The Hat is a being from another dimension. He’s been magically bound to help a specific family for thousands of years…
I don’t know if it’s a quirk, exactly. When I’m writing, I can picture my story unfold as if I’m watching a film on a screen. I can imagine exactly how each character looks and sounds, down to the minute detail. In fact, when I was writing Love Snaggs, I could easily picture my story as an animated movie.
What do you think are the elements of a good story?
Of course, the plot has to be good; it has to draw me in. But for a story to be exquisite, you have to give your readers an immersive experience, not only with the plot but also with the characters. The characters have to be robust & realistic in such a way that the reader can truly empathize with them and make an emotional connection. And last, but certainly not least, the ending should…
As usual, here is your warning that this story has cursing, sex (not graphic), innuendo, and violence. It’s my Rated-R action adventure called Derailing Bedlam. This is the fourth outing (third official) for Cassidy and Lloyd, so feel free to click on one of the two covers to see how it started. Each one is 99 cents!
Don’t touch that dial! You’ve landed on Lisa Burton Radio, the only show that brings you characters from the books you love. Today might be one of the sweetest shows we’ve ever had, and I mean that literally. “Please give a warm welcome to my special guest, the fondant lion.”
“Thank you, Lisa, I am so happy to be here, I feel a roar coming on. RRRROOOOAAAARRRR!”
“I know you are famous for your thick mane. Is it thicker because you live in the zoo?”
“Yes, that is likely. I don’t live in just any zoo, I live in the Chocolate Land zoo and it is a special place. All the fondant animals that live here are very happy and we receive excellent care from Sir Chocolate and his helpers. One of our favourite meals is Sir Chocolate’s famous custard. He makes it for us in an enormous pot. I…
Hi everyone, my name is Tineke and I am an author. No really, an honest to God author. What makes an author? Writing. Writing anything that makes slightly sense and you are a writer. In my book, a writer and author are the same thing. According to some you need to be published to be an author.
What is your most interesting writing quirk?
Legends of Windemere 