Secrets for Successful submissions –

• Start your novel off with a bang – a hook that draws the reader in and holds them in place so they want to read the rest. Boring beginnings mean no readers, and no publication!
• Make sure you follow the publisher’s format guide. Using flowery fonts and adding photos when the guideline says NO photos will result in a rejection. Sending the submission in the body of an email will result in a deleted submission, as will sending it to the wrong email box.
• Again – we cannot say this often enough – SHOW don’t TELL – you can do a Google search for more examples.
• Are you getting rejection after rejection and don’t know why? Join an on-line writing or critique group and ask them to look at your work. Sometimes writers can’t see their own mistakes. Once you get past the common, simple mistakes you’ll be accepted more often than you’re rejected!

Article about the importance of backing up your work!

BACKUP STRATEGIES By John Hommel Certified Computer and Network Technician

Have you ever been sitting at your computer typing away and had the computer lock up and lose all of your work for you?  Have you ever been sitting at your computer and all of a sudden gotten a pretty blue screen that has a bunch of numbers on it and tells you to reboot your computer?  When you rebooted the computer, was the data magically gone?  Have you ever been the victim of the dreaded computer gremlins who just seem to feast on your data make it disappear from your hard drive?  Has your hard drive ever “crashed” and made your data inaccessible?

 If you have used a computer for any length of time, you are likely to answer yes to at least one of those questions.  Catastrophic failures are a part of computer life.  Recovery from them is becoming an art form.  Authors are extremely creative individuals who pour their hearts and souls into their work and should never have to suffer from computer gremlins.  Computer gremlins can be avoided by backing up your work to a place other than your hard drive and storing the backup away from your computer.

Many backup methods exist, but I am only going to discuss two of them here because they are the simplest and most readily available.  The first  of these is backing up your work to some kind of optical media such as a CD or DVD.  Most computers these days have a CD burner or a DVD burner in them and burning software “bundled” into the software package that comes with the computer.

CD media is available in two formats, CD-R and CD-RW.  CD-R media can be written to once and once only, so if you want to use it for backups, you need to keep a few of them around.  CD-RW media is rewritable.  It can be used over and over again.  I believe it can be written about 1,000 times before it has to be replaced. If you are going to use CD-RW media, you will need to format is using your burning software before you make your first burn.  Then, as you add to your work, you can save your work to the hard drive and then copy the work from the hard drive to the CD.  The capacity of a CD is limited to about 700 MB, but that is a lot of text.

DVD media is much the same as CD media with the major exception that it holds much more data, about 4.7 GB.  That’s a lot! DVD media comes in R and RW and + and – formats. I recommend the + and RW formats, so I would use DVD+RW media for data storage. To write DVD media, you need a DVD writer.

 My favorite method of backing up data is to use a USB key.  These handy little devices can be carried in your pocket, purse, or whatever.  USB keys plug into USB ports on your computer.

USB Keys are available in various capacities from 128 MB to about 4 Gb and larger.  They are inexpensive and extremely reliable.  I have even had one go through the washing machine and work fine despite the ordeal.

To use a USB key, just plug it into the computer, wait for the computer to recognize it, and save your work to it.  Unplug it an put it away in a location away from the computer.

Backups should be kept in an area that is away from the computer and the regular work area.  What would happen if (Heaven forbid) a fire should occur where the computer is stored and the backup is on the desk with the computer?  Get the point?

Any questions about this or any other computer subject can be emailed to me at my email address jhommel@houston.rr.com.