Published January 6, 2012 | 
Good day to all of our fellow writers out there. We hope you and your family had a safe and happy holiday. We have been really lax in posting updates to this website and have made a New Years Resolution to change that over the upcoming year. To start the ball rolling we have added some new links to the link section and are recommending some new websites that cater to writers.
One is the Funds for Writers website that has a weekly FREE Newsletter that you can sign up for and is written for and about writing. If you find the newsletters helpful and you can afford the $15 you can sign-up for the Total Funds for Writers Newsletter that list lots of pages each issue filled with sources of income, publishing and contests for writers. Go to the website: Funds For Writers and read through the materials. You will find it extremely helpful.
Our other place to find funding for your writing projects has to the the KICKSTARTER website. If you haven’t checked out this website yet it will be worth your while to read through some of the projects currently asking for funding, read through some proposals and watch their videos. When you are ready then you can sign up on their website and create your own project page. Remember this is an All-OR-NOTHING funding source so keep in mind that you want to ask for the best funding amount that will accomplish your goal but not be too much that you run out of time before you reach your funding goal. You can always try again but you will have adjust your goals and create a whole new campaign. And, please, should you actually win your funding make sure you honor your Gifts that your offer in return for your funding.
Last, but not least, our sponsor, Jolene’s Books and More, has created a new website to launch a writing contest. It is called the Contemporary Limericks Contest. You will have to pay a small fee of $5 per individual for turning in 1 to 5 Limericks and the currently monthly cash prize is only $50.00 for 1st Place and $20.00 for 2nd place but the Top Ten Finalists will have their winning limericks placed into the Best Limericks of 2012 eBook that will be published on their website at the end of the year. This is a monthly contest with the first winners announced on March 1st. You can enter each month for the monthly prize. Now, you might be telling yourself, Hey, I don’t Write Limericks! I say, what do you have to lose? The limericks can be about any subject you wish. They do have to be family oriented or rated “G”. And what better way to practice writing than to actually try doing a few limericks. They are fun and can be easy to do. It is a great exercise for putting together a very short story and let’s face it as much as we love the written word, what can be more fun than putting together some rhyming words about your friends, family, pets, neighborhood or your favorite hobby. Just go to the website: http://all-about-limericks.jolenesbooksandmore.com and check it out!
Published October 9, 2010 | Writers need to keep themselves educated. Attending classes online or in a classroom is vital to maintain your skills or to learn new ones. There are some FREE or very inexpensive resources out there if you know where to look. My favorite place is the Virtual University or KSURF as it is now called. They started off offering short online classes on a variety of different subjects for the low price of $15 for up to 4 classes. Sadly, they have grown so much that they are having to charge per course now. Granted, they are much cheaper than attending a college class or even the community educational classes offered by your local school district. Most of the courses are still just 6 short weeks and are given at your own pace, of course, and online. You can receive Continuing Educational Credits (a certificate of completion) as well as a transcript of the courses you have taken. Currently they are offering beginning writers courses in grammar, punctuation and word usage. They also have courses for writers who want to write romantic fiction and fantasy fiction as well as courses discussing criminal investigation and profiling for those mystery writers out there. Most of their courses do not require you to purchase a book. Please read through the course descriptions to make sure before you sign-up for the course.
Another resource you might want to read about is offered by the Education Portal. They have a article featuring the 10 Universities offering FREE writing courses. You should read through all of the requirements before signing up and most if not all of them may require you to purchase a book. But, hey, the course is FREE and is being offered by some of the big-named universities such as MIT and Perdue. Check out the article at: http://education-portal.com/articles/10_Universities_Offering_Free_Writing_Courses_Online.html
Another great resource for writers is the website Write101.com. Their website is chock full of information for those who want to learn how to write effectively. Yes, this a commercial website that sells “How to Write” products but they offer a lot of FREE information as well. From the wording on the website they are based in England but for us U.S. writers we will just have to ignore the supposed misspellings of words like Centre. You can sign up for the newsletter and receive writing tips, browse their article section and learn about what is good prose and improve your vocabulary. They have a special section for writers, students and parents as well.
Published May 1, 2010 | Whether you consider yourself a novice or an expert at computers we all need help once in a while to keep our computers going, fixing small problems, and possibly even creating a website. Most writers want to just write. If you write about anything other than computers then you will probably need help creating a website to speak to your readers, let them know about your upcoming books, answer questions from your readers and a wide variety of other things. Most readers now-a-days will try to find a website to read about their favorite authors and the characters that they have created.
Just to let you know a novice computer user is someone who only knows enough to operate their computers and do what they have to do. Even if you can check your email, create documents, print them out, attach your books to your email for your publisher, etc. you will need help every now and then. To become a more effective computer user you should, occasionally, read articles from experts about how to maintain your computer and protect it from viruses. Since we usually only deal with Windows Personal Computers and laptops most of our articles will be about them. If you need assistance with Linux or Apple systems we suggest that you find an expert in the field and see if they have a blog or forum for you to read.
Simple things that you can do to protect your computer include:
1. Perform a Disk CleanUp each Week. (Program Built Into Windows)
2. Perform a Defrag each Week. (Manually done on all Windows Programs Except Vista and Windows 7 it is automatically done once a week already)
3. Clean out your Cookies, Temp Files and History from each of your Browsers.
4. Keep Your Virus Protection Program Updated Weekly, Your subscription Paid Up and once a month perform a FULL Virus Scan. This will take some time so be patient.
5. If you have Windows downloading their Updates Automatically then do a Manual Update Once a Month and Choose Custom Scan. This will give you all the hardware and optionally updates that are not included in the Critical Windows Updates.
6. BACK UP YOUR FILES REGULARLY. Get Yourself an external Hard Drive that plugs into a USB port and manually copy over your files at least once a week. DO NOT USE THE WINDOWS BACK-UP/RECOVER PROGRAM. This will back up your files in a compressed file that ONLY that version of windows can recover for you.
Published April 3, 2010 | If you are an aspiring writer there are literally thousands of websites out there that offer information for new writers. You can read about it on the internet, check out a book or even attend seminars. I don’t know about you but I would like all the FREE information I can get. So be very careful which website you take advice from and especially those who want you to pay for advice. As writers we are constantly doing research and research must be done for the rest of your career. So, if you don’t like to do research then you will have to hire someone to do it for you or probably not get anything published. I know, I know, you say Poetry doesn’t require any research but you are wrong. How do you think you will find news ways to express yourself? You look up words in a dictionary, thesaurus or synonym directory. Most of these are available online and are offered for FREE as well.
Remember that not everyone who has a website is an expert. You have to check out their history, get advice from professors, friends and other writers. Try some of their techniques and if they work then read some more from that same author. After learning the mechanics of writing then the only think left is to write, write and write!
Published March 10, 2010 | A writer’s website is slightly different from other kinds of websites. The biggest difference is you. You want your website to reflect your personality, your writing style and probably your characters. Each person’s website is a reflection of who you are, what kind of writer you are and how you want to communicate with your readers. Some writers would like to sell to their readers as well. A website is just pages on the internet with information you want to convey to your readers. You can get a personal as you want but generally you put your information on the pages, upload some pictures and make changes only when necessary. If you want to communicate with your readers on a more regular basis then you should consider a BLOG style website.
For the purposes of our website here we will only talk about what a website is and what it should contain. There are a few things that most readers have in common when they look for their favorite writers website. One of those is a clean layout. Having a website that is all jumbled together throws people off. Another thing you want to consider is a color scheme. Which colors you choose is pretty important. They should be colors you like, have a good contrast between background and text but they should also be easy on the eyes. Blaring colors or flashing panels are hard on the reader’s eyes. There are some interesting articles about choosing a color scheme on the internet. One of them you might want to look at is at: http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/design/color_combinations.php3
Finally, you should start writing down what you want to include on your pages. There are a few pages that every website should include such as a biography or About page on the author, a Contact page so that your readers can contact you, a Privacy Policy page and a page with a listing of your books with a brief synopsis. How you arrange your books on this page is really up to you but you might want to consider have several pages like one for each book and/or one for each series (If you write series fiction). And finally, you need to let the readers know where they can get your books!
Published January 15, 2010 | Welcome writers. If you are looking for a website creation service then we can help you. On our SERVICES page is a listing of our services. We offer an inexpensive and fast service. We do the work for you other than posting your information. Once your website is setup and functioning properly all you have to do is add all your data, pictures, etc. We will create the pages themselves and once you have added your information we will go back and make sure that all is working as it should be. Once you that happens you will just need to add information as it becomes necessary.
Our Blog area will contain helpful articles for the writer to keep their websites fresh, maintain their computers and any other questions that our subscribers and customers have asked about in the past. So look around and contact us if you have any questions.
Cheers