Allow me a rant.
Or what amounts to a rant from me. People tell me I’m a difficult person to read, that I’m unflappable. One long time friend told me he’d known me for almost twenty years and still felt he’d only seen the waves on the ocean, maybe six feet deep, and there was a whole ocean underneath he didn’t know of, that I kept to myself.
This surprised me as I think I’m incredibly open regarding what I think and feel. Want to know something about me? Ask. I’ll tell you. I promised myself long ago I’d answer any direct question with a direct answer. The challenge there, if any, is making sure I understand what’s being asked.
That’s not the rant, just the preamble. I don’t rant. I’ll speak out and take action when I believe doing so will make things better for all involved, otherwise, no.
Now, the rant.
I’m helping a local bookstore get local authors to do booksignings, presentations, readings, classes, you get the idea. It’s called Authors’ Exchange and you read about it further down in this newsletter.
I get the word out via this newsletter, my social feeds (LI, FB, XoTwit, IG, BS, Mastodon, Cumquot, LottaJuice, and Mycoderm (yes, I made those last three up)), emailing authors I know, … In other words, I work it!
Because I’m creating posters, handling booking, putting up web pages, scheduling, arranging, and all else involved in doing so, I ask for some help from the authors taking part.
The ask is, to me, simple; You have to promote your own event (duh!), and you have to promote all the other Authors’ Exchange events moving forward.
IE, not just your own. This “I help you-You help me” is called cooperative marketing, or co-marketing.
<typical Joseph understatement alert>
I spent a little while in marketing and know a little about this.
</typical Joseph understatement alert>
Co-marketing is strong marketing. It is WOM (Word-of-Mouth) and referral-based marketing (two of the best marketing methods on the planet), and I’ve seen co-marketing drive business and sales repeatedly across the globe, large and small companies, doesn’t matter, find people or organizations doing what you do and/or similar to yours and partner your marketing efforts with them.
I often hear people not want to promote others because they might lose sales of their own books when readers purchase another author’s books.
Wow.
I routinely promote others’ work (this newsletter is an example) and you know what? Amazing things happen. I get invited to take part in fiction and non-fiction anthologies, contribute opinion pieces, write for shared-universe series, co-author, teach, share, am a regular at booksignings, am asked to lead on- and off-line discussion groups, AND!!! the authors I help and promote reciprocate.
Co-marketing is strong marketing, and strong marketing sells books, gets your name out, gets your work out, and promotes your career.
So there’s the carrot. Now for the stick.
I have no patience or tolerance for people (in any profession) who take without giving. I’m a pay-it-forward kind of guy. You helped me, I’ll help you and I’ll help the next guy. The first is good social marketing, both are good business, the last is being a good person.
So I include a stick in the Authors’ Exchange pitch; Share/Post/Pitch your event and all other Authors’ Exchange events moving forward. Miss one? It happens. Miss two? Your video and all your marketing materials come down, you’re not invited for a second, third, or hundred-and-eighth appearance, so on and so forth.
Yeah, I’m a bastard.
Did I mention I spent a little while in marketing?
I learned my lessons well and now share them with you.
March 2026 Announcements
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RoundTable 360° – Our 26 March 2026 RoundTable 360° session is Bridging the Gap How does a creator move from a 9-5 day job to a self-sustaining artistic career? This session is led by voice artist Kyle Ouellette. Thursday, 26 March 2026 7:30-8:30pmET.
For so many people who have a story to tell, a song in their heart, or any stripe of creative passion it often comes after the day’s hardest efforts. Crammed into stolen time at the end of a double shift, during your lunch break at the office, and late nights on weekends. What we call the side hustle today can be hard to get fully airborne and capable of lifting us out of our dependency on a stable ‘job’ with the benefits that we so precariously need.
What advice, insight, and wisdom can be gleaned as we discuss our own thoughts and paths toward creative freedom and financial independence? What methods are there to take advantage of certain trends, marketplaces, and platforms in order to find the off-ramp from living a double life to one of self sufficiency and independence?
Reserve your seat. |
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A Tool Requires Some Testing – Long ago and far away (okay, 2016) I switched to full-time authoring, knew my work needed improvement, took classes, read books, hired coaches, studied studied studied, and distilled some of the low-hanging fruit (word usage, language, tenses, clauses, …) into a tool that reads text and highlights weaknesses.
The tool helped me early on because it showed me how to tighten my writing by reading through a manuscript and finding weak words, unnecessary modifiers, passive voice, auxiliary verbs, weak POV, prepositional POV, … About 17 different problems in its current version (there’s five more things I could have it do, never got around to it).
I used this tool and hammered through lots of my early work and it helped greatly for two main reasons:
- I knew it wasn’t perfect
- It showed me weaknesses I didn’t know I had
The tool showed me how to improve my writing. Repeated use showed me I needed it less and less. After a few weeks I got to the point where the tool only showed me its own imperfections, not my weaknesses.
Currently the tool catches
- Unnecessary modifier
- Passive Voice and/or auxiliary verb
- Adverb/Adjective
- Weak POV
- Weak POV due to Preposition
- Unnecessary Pointer
- Weak Verb
- Attribution/Saidism
- Unnecessary Qualifier
- Duffer Dialogue
- Modal Verb
- Weak Word
- Clutter word(s)
- Mood Changer
- Manner Adverb
- Needless Word
- Flabby Speech
With a little extra effort on my part it can also catch Conjunctions, Subordinating Conjunctions, Relative Clauses, and the catch-alls “You Should Know Better” and “Word Vermin.” I never added last five because what I already put into it taught me enough to clean up my prose on my own.
And that’s the point; the tool’s purpose is to flag weaknesses so I could learn how to write better.
The tool is simple, moronic, and doltish. There’s no AI, no smarts, nothing sexy or exciting. It works via simple pattern matching, meaning it makes mistakes, won’t appreciate your voice and style, et cetera. It’s automated and has no intelligence, hence will flag things which fit a pattern whether the pattern applies or not. What it will do is draw your attention to some quick&easy wins, and who doesn’t need more of those these days?
I and others find it valuable because it forces us to justify every word and every construction, meaning you learn to pay attention to sloppy writing habits, or as one author I’m working with commented “…it certainly forces you to justify every word, which any word that can be eliminated w/o loss of mood or meaning is, 90% of the time, best eliminated. (Publications that pay by the word encourage bad writing.)”
Take a look at the image on the left. Whatever is colored is potentially weak writing. That’s what the tool did to the first few paragraphs of last month’s newsletter musing.
I’m looking for authors interested in giving me feedback on it, specifically should I make it available on my site.
Interested? Send me one page you’ve written (500 words or less and only nb, doc, docX, or rtf, please), which catch you’re interested in, and I’ll get back to you usually within a day with the tool’s output. |
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Sister Donna Huston Murrary’s Proof Positive – A young ex-cop with nothing to lose but her life tackles a dangerous cold case.
Set in among northeastern Ohio’s farmland, the tiny town of Worthy rarely experiences a murder. So naturally, when a shooter fires into a group of senior dance students, killing a woman and maiming her partner, the county sheriff detains the only stranger who was there. Eying her across his desk, he’s not sure whether she’s the shooter, as some survivors claim, the vindictive person who hired the hit, or the calmest witness he ever met.
Lauren Beck stopped being a police officer in Landis, Pennsylvania, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. She’s enormously grateful to be alive and cancer-free, but she’s still broke and homeless, the result of being framed by a felon for his many crimes. Worthy, Ohio, just happened to be the latest spot Lauren’s missing mother used her cell phone, the dance studio a place she might be found. Infuriated by the shooting, Lauren ran after the killer without thinking—in hindsight, a reckless mistake. Even after a homicide-detective/friend vouches for her, the sheriff warns her not to leave town.
Learning that the dance-studio victim was helping the FBI investigate a sensational bank robbery/multiple-murder case, Lauren’s cop instincts kick in. Was that why the woman was killed? Rather than interfere with the sheriff’s department, or, god-forbid, the FBI, Lauren quietly pursues the only avenue open to her: retracing the victim’s movements …
…and quickly learns why the case remains unsolved. Even after twenty-nine years, the perpetrator is well equipped to thwart law enforcement. Accomplices, both male and female, young and old, make each new lead Lauren follows more treacherous than the last.
Will she solve the heinous crime that confounded so many for so long?
Or, like her immediate predecessor, will she die trying?
If you like scrappy heroines, white-knuckle suspense, and twisted mysteries, you’ll love PROOF POSITIVE.
$.99 EBOOK PRE-ORDER AVAILABLE NOW A Lauren Beck Crime Novel #4 |
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Writers’ Month Long Workshop – April 2026’s writers’ workshop covers many if not all phases of craft and storytelling. The workshop is on Wednesdays, 1-29 Apr 2026, morning and evening openings available. Note there are five Wednesdays in April so folks get a bonus session this month only.
Sign up here.
You can an idea of what craziness (and learning!) will ensue on my Experiments in Writing posts. |
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Bound Together Books and Northern Lights Publishing Present… – Bound Together owner Michelle Audet’s asked me to help her vet authors and host regular author events at her West Peart St, Nashua, store. I’m currently seeking authors willing to give up a Saturday night, 6-8pmET, to talk about their work, take part in a panel discussion, give a class/training, read, sign, et cetera.
Email me if all the following are true
- You have at least one (1) book published and available. The more recently published the better, or if your book has a regional or seasonal tie in, also good.
- You can get to Nashua to drop off 5-10 of your books two weeks prior to your scheduled event AND for your scheduled event.
- You can make time for a Zoom chat with me so I can put together a 5-10m promo material for your book/topic/presentation. This means a hi-res headshot, hi-res bookcover, blurb, writeup, pitchline, teaser, backcover copy, related hi-res artwork, basically material we can put together to get the word out.
- And this is the big one: You will actively promote ALL author events, not just your own. Actively means via your social media (FB, LI, IG, TikTok, BlueSky, Mastodon, Cameroon, Dingbat, Marzipan (and yes, I made the last three up), your blog, … and several times, not just once. Fail to do so and you’re event will be canceled. This also applies to authors after their event. Failure to promote other authors brings your videos down.
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Talk with the Editors – Wilderness House Literary Review EIC Steve Glines and I (Senior Fiction Editor) hold monthly open chats with authors interested in a) writing for us, b) improving their craft in general, and/or c) increasing their chances of being accepted by other markets.
Meetings are held via Zoom on the last Friday of each month from 9-10amET.
So, want to know how to write for us? Want to know what gets our attention? Want to know how to write better for whatever market you’re interested in? Join us for our next “Meet the Editors” Zoom session. Seats limited! Sign up and talk with us. We’re relatively easy going and fun to be with. |
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Rika Chandra’s Not-Yet Mother’s Day Offer – She writes:
Over the past few months, I’ve been immersed in someone’s life story.
Long conversations. Old photographs.
Memories slowly turning into chapters.
This week, I shared a small glimpse of the finished book. It was commissioned as a personal birthday gift by a daughter-in-law, together with her husband, for his mother.
Watching someone hold their own story, bound, printed, and honoured, never feels ordinary.
It feels like preservation.
Like saying, this life mattered.
With Mother’s Day approaching, I wanted to extend a quiet invitation.
If there is a woman in your life whose stories you’ve always meant to record, your mum, grandmother, or aunt, perhaps this is the year to begin.
A biography commission does not start with a form or a package.
It begins with a conversation.
If you’d like to explore what that might look like, simply reply to this email. I would be glad to talk you through it.
Before I sign off…
I wanted to share something close to my heart.
A dear friend of mine, Ashinsa, has just published her first book:
Becoming Bilingual in Early Childhood with the Bop! Methodology
We went to school together, and I have loved watching her build a life in France while balancing motherhood and career. This book is rooted in her experience raising her son bilingually, and it offers practical, reassuring guidance for families navigating life between languages.
If you are raising children in a multilingual home, or know someone who is, this would make a thoughtful and genuinely useful gift.
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Brother Greg Hickey’s Sage Advice For those of you not familiar with Brother Greg’s history, he was an international athlete, a forensics expert, and now a darn good novelist. He offers some sage advice for writers and non-writers alike.
Unless you’re a fellow writer, there’s no reason for you to read The Story Grid, editor Shawn Coyne’s guide to dissecting a manuscript. I’m currently reading it for insights on how to improve my self-editing, and it’s been helpful as I revise my new Marcus Carver novel. But I wasn’t expecting pearls of wisdom that apply to any aspect of life.
In the middle of advising writers how to map out their stories, Coyne drops this nugget: “You are not the problem. The problem is the problem.”
As I’ve mentioned in at least one previous email, this current book has felt more challenging that usual. The first draft came in fits and starts, and when I finally filled in all the chapters I had planned, I knew I had my work cut out for me in my second draft. That has proved to be true.
I’ve let my struggles get to me on more than one writing day. How will I manage to craft a new story that lives up to the world I created in The Even Horizon Murder and Murder in Retrograde? Is this series dead before it ever got rolling? Should I just give up and write something else? Will I ever write something good again?
Coyne’s wisdom came at the perfect time. I’m not the problem. I’ve written successful novels before. Many of you have told me how much you enjoyed one of my previous books. The problem is that there are several scenes and story arcs in my current draft that need work. I just need to fix them, one at a time.
As we do every two years, my wife and I have spent the last several evenings consuming as much Olympics coverage as we can manage. Amid the standout performances and inspirational achievements, there seems to have been much more coverage of the dark psychological side of sports in recent years. From Simone Biles to Ilia Malinin to Chloe Kim, athletes have laid bare their competitive failures and their struggles to rise to the pressures of their sport. So if the people who are better at their sport than most of us are at anything have these doubts, what hope is there for us mere mortals?
Again, “You are not the problem. The problem is the problem.” No Olympian is a bad athlete. But they face problems just like the rest of us. They suffer physical injuries and mental collapses. But there are solutions to those problems, whether in the form of rehabilitation, a new training program or focused psychotherapy.
And the same is true for all of us, in every aspect of our lives. We all have problems that make us feel inferior and incapable. But that does not mean we are inferior and incapable. We just need to identify the problems in our lives and figure out how to solve them.
In the spirit of this learning, Brother Greg’s sharing an excerpt from his current work-in-progress. It introduces Bo Lee, an antagonist to Marcus Carver he’s enjoyed creating and whom he expect will appear in future Carver novels. Read it on his blog |
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Cicatrix needs first readers.
Paul is a mathematical genius. Nobody doubts that. His thesis demonstrates a way to mathematically bridge realities, to bring what’s “over there” to “here” and vice-versa.
The problem is nobody really knows what’s “over there,” and people can only imagine based on their experiences. You can describe the ocean to someone but until they experience it first hand, they really don’t understand it. Similarly, committees shouldn’t be allowed to design horses. Paul experiments with his reality engines, but much of what he conceives of being “over there” is based on childhood trauma. There are monsters over there, and Paul’s equations bring one “here,” to finish the work his parents began years ago.
Cicatrix is ~20k words, novella length. Email me if you’d like to be a first reader, let me know what needs fixing, and how to fix it. |
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Graphic Artist Needed!!! I mention Recovery Triptych needing first readers above.
That book and the metahuman anthology Tales of the Northern Clan are planned as graphic novels.
Right now the big challenge to that plan is finding a graphic artist, so please send any graphic artists familiar with that format to us. Thanks. |
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A Little Game – How can you tell if an elephant’s in bed with you?
The first five people to get back to me with a correct answer get a signed Tales Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires Volume 2 ebook. The first person to get back to me with answers that make me laugh gets a signed print copy (and no looking it up on the internet, folks!). |
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That’s it for March. See you next month!
Enjoy!
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