How Breaking Bad Made Me a Better Writer

As I’ve said before, I live in the middle of nowhere. We don’t even have cable TV. In order to get any TV, you need satellite. Well, our phone company about a year or so ago promised us we would have cable this year (2012). Umm, yeah, didn’t happen. So, since we have lovely DSL internet, we decided to do Netflix.

I normally don’t like shows like Breaking Bad. It’s not my normal viewing fare. My hubby got me into watching it—we watch 1 episode every morning as we eat breakfast. At first I didn’t like it, it was drama, drug-related, and in general, rather crude. But something happened after the first few episodes: I found myself looking forward to the next episode. Why? Suspense. Continue reading “How Breaking Bad Made Me a Better Writer”

Dlvr.it Delivers: Promoting Blog Posts

When you have a new blog post, how do you notify your followers on Twitter and Facebook? Initially I did it the old-fashioned way. I scheduled the blog post and shortly after it published, I’d manually tweet and share to Facebook. That worked unless I slept in that day (don’t tell my boss) or was deep into a project for my day job and forgot (please do tell my boss).

However, my ideal situation was to be able to schedule a post and have a tweet and a post sharing the link on Facebook happen automatically. I found a plethora of ways to accomplish the tweet, but when it came to Facebook, I wasn’t happy with any of the solutions. My main complaint was that none of the approaches I found gave a post with a picture. All of my blog posts start with a picture of a book cover or an author. Facebook posts with pictures, what you’d get as the default if sharing a link of the blog post manually, catch my attention much quicker than plain text. Continue reading “Dlvr.it Delivers: Promoting Blog Posts”

DJ Edwardson Announces New Release

Author DJ Edwardson is pleased to announce the release of his new high-tech Science Fiction novel, Into the Vast.

When Adan awakes in a research facility known as the Institute he has no memory of who he was. Worse still, the scientists nursing him back to health don’t seem to care. They only seem interested in him as a research project. But the strange technology they’ve fused inside of him and his missing memories are only the beginning as he finds himself swept up in a conflict between the researchers and the last remnants of humanity untouched by their experiments.

Step into the journey of one man to rediscover his own identity and in the process to save humanity from its greatest enemy: itself.

Into the Vast is now available from Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Kobo and Barnes & Noble.

Things I Learned on My Book Tour by Marni Graff

Author Marni Graff
Author Marni Graff

I just returned from a book tour that saw me driving my car from my North Carolina home to Maine and back, visiting a loop of seven states in twenty-eight days. Of the nineteen planned events, seventeen occurred. I met many great readers, connected with cousins I hadn’t seen in years, and had a wonderful mini-reunion in my hometown library, selling my newest and my original mystery. Living out of my car for a month, here’s what I learned about what I did right and what I would change. (You can read part one of this series – the “before I left” post – here.) Continue reading “Things I Learned on My Book Tour by Marni Graff”