Walter Mosley’s “This Year You Write Your Novel”

Walter Mosley’s “This Year You Write Your Novel” is an excellent read for authors at any stage in their career

I picked up This Year You Write Your Novel because I was reading Mosley’s The Man in My Basement and Devil in a Blue Dress and wanted to understand Mosley’s choices in the book. There were some authorial moves I understood, some completely threw me.

This Year You Write Your Novel is a short, powerful book. I read lots of books on writing methods, techniques, scene, character, language, et cetera and I was truly impressed at how much Mosley packed into 103 pages. It’s all there. Now here’s the funny part; I wouldn’t recommend the book to someone who’s been writing for a while, say a year or two, and doing it as a past time or leisure time activity. My sense is it would prove too confusing or even misinformational. It’s a great book (full of gems) for people who are about to write and those who already have a career going for them. The former will find a useful guide into a world they don’t know much, if anything, about. The latter will find lots of triggers for things they know but not consciously, for techniques they use but can’t name and will find themselves going “Oh, that’s right, that’s right” more often than not (I did, anyway).


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You smell so good to me

Do you want “me love you good Charlie, me make you happy long time” or a relationship?

This post originally appeared on NextStage‘s That Think You Do blog in April 2016. We’re resurrecting it here for some Facebook friends who asked “Do Women Like or Prefer Men, that Wear Scents or Cologne?

Continuing with the thread introduced in You Smell Funny, we discovered some more research about how humans non-consciously use their olfactory sense (sense of smell) for mating purposes (like dating, finding the one you love, finding the one you’ll love once versus forever, finding the “me love you good Charlie, me make you happy long time”, all that kind of stuff) and thought to share it because we know you’re all out there just dying to know…
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You smell funny

Ah, the joys of individual body chemistries.

This post originally appeared on the other platform on 29 Jan 2010. We resurrected it on NextStage‘s That Think You Do blog in April 2016 and now here for some Facebook friends who asked “Do Women Like or Prefer Men, that Wear Scents or Cologne?

Perfumers and associated industries spend an incredible amount of money producing various scents for our use. Deodorants mask the caucasian from smelling like goats for example. And I’m not kidding about the goal smell, either.
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How Self-Published Book Author and Marketing Maven Phillip Strang Gets Amazon Reviews

Learn how DCI Isaac Cook and DI Keith Tremayne Thriller Author Phillip Strang got over 300 reviews on Amazon

Phillip StrangPeople following me on social networks know that our first Author Interview Plunge is with crime thriller author Phillip Strang and is scheduled for 12:01pmET Wednesday, 10 Jan 2018. If you’re reading this post after that date/time, you can find his interview at Phillip Strang – Murder is a Tricky Business (British Sleuths and Publishing Analytics) (that link won’t be active until after that date/time).

Phillip and I were talking a few days after the interview and I asked him how he managed to get so many reviews (over 300) on Amazon. He graciously shared his methodology with me and gave me permission to share it with you.

A 15 Step Program
Important: The first step is not recognizing you have a problem, it’s deciding you want to succeed.
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Blind Idiots

In a world where alternative facts are de rigueur, it’s worth noting a slight mistake made in a BBC documentary entitled “Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial” (it’s a brilliant documentary. Let’s hope we never repeat the reason for its making).

Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial
There’s a line close to the beginning about Hitler and Goering; “…together they destroyed German democracy.”

Sorry, that can’t be correct. Unless they were the only ones doing anything at the time. History says otherwise. There were lots of people in Germany, lots of people in Europe, lots of people in the world at the time. Still are.

To say that two people brought down a country…wow…that’s pretty much stating that the rest of the country, continent and world were idiots.
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