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Quick tips to help you polish your story or
manuscript before you submit!
Too many rejections? Avoid these common
beginner errors:
- Overuse of WAS/WERE –
See how many times you’ve used "was"
and "were" in your story – try to use stronger verbs instead. Not
all was and were can be eliminated, but most can, so do it! This
can be as simple as changing "She was crying" to "She
cried." Avoid the "passive" – always think ACTION! The word
"was" indicates a passive sentence. Instead of "The ball was
kicked by the boy" say "The boy kicked the ball." Your
story will tighten up, and flow, without the dreaded "to be"
verbs.
- Overuse of LY adverbs
– Replacing a weak verb with a
stronger action verb eliminates the need for the LY adverb.
Instead of "She hurriedly ate her burger" say "She
gobbled her burger." Use simple and to the point writing –
instead of "John walked quickly to the car" say "John
rushed to the car."
- Obtrusive tag lines
– It is better to use "beats" (short
bits of action) to define who is speaking in your story. There are
times when you have to use a tag such as "he said" "she said" –
but as long as readers know who is speaking you don’t need them.
Here’s an example of an action beat – instead of "I just killed
a man," Mark exclaimed, say Mark wiped the bloody knife on
his sleeve. "I just killed a man." You know Mark is talking
because of the "beat".
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.
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