While there's no substitute for a human editor, there are some wonderful tools which can not only help you save money and time with your editor by presenting them a cleaner manuscript from the start, but which can also help you identify patterns of error and weakness in your writing. Once you know those patterns, you can improve your writing as a whole.The three tools above (the pictures are linked to their product pages) are the ones I use on a daily basis when writing, revising, and editing. Let's dive a bit deeper into what these are and how I use them.
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Three books seems to be about all I can get through during COVID-19 in a month.
Writing these days is sparse. I keep picking at Long Weekend, and I'm finding myself slowly rising above the COVID-19 distraction on some days. I know if I can focus for a couple of days in a row, I'm likely to get hooked into the characters enough that I will pick up some speed.       I am still getting in about six reads a month, but I suspect that will slow down a bit because I am starting to work on a manuscript again and have some travel coming up this month.
Because I was still in Kindle Unlimited in February as a reader, I blazed through the most recent Jack Daniels novels. Shot Girl was amazing and Chaser was a bit of a return to the slapstick humor of Harry McGlade and packing a bajillion villains in one novel. Shot Girl is a definite read, though, even if you are feeling a little fatigued by Konrath's series. He has, in both, reinvented Herb, which is a nice touch after so many fat jokes about the guy. Tig Notaro's book will appeal to those who love the show One Mississippi as it covers much of the same time period--her mother's sudden death, Tig's battle with breast cancer, and her finding the love of her life. I listened to this one. I also listened to The Underground Railroad. What a great history lesson of a novel (and I mean that in the best way possible). I look forward to The Nickel Boys. The two non-fiction books here were both review choices--you will find Depressed to Daring's review up on Reedsy Discovery and my review of A Leader's Guide to Memorable Speeches in the upcoming issue of Physician Family. I hope everyone is meeting their reading goals! Because I'm still chipping away at my own ensemble novel, I've been reading a lot of examples of multi-perspective books across genres. Here's what I finished in January.
 According to my Kindle downloads page, I purchased Book 1, Maladaptation, back in October 2015. I read about 50% back then, and for some reason the book got buried under a pile of other reading. I suspect my constant library binge reading had something to do with it, as I was determined to get as much play out of the Kansas City Library as I could. When my library card finally expired, I came back to find that Ramie completed two more books in the series and given them all cohesive covers. I jumped back in!
This is the start of monthly Indie book reviews. I may do them more frequently, but I figure an indie a month is a good goal I can hopefully meet. To view Adan Ramie's Amazon Author page, click the image above.  I'm in that spot where I finished a big project, Elegant Freefall, and I'm wondering what to work on now. How did I know I was done with the book? When I turned my laptop off yesterday and pulled up the 50000th Kindle version on my tablet and saw a random period. I ran to my laptop, booted it up, and went to open the file in Scrivener.
Before the laptop was fully booted, I picked up my Fire and wiped the screen. My errant period was a fleck of something.  Because I'm in the midst of revising and editing the last third of Elegant Freefall, I've been considering options lately. And, it still seems to me that there are a lot of ways to spend a ton of money for little to no exposure.
NOTE: Unless you just like reading about my own quandary about exclusivity, this post is likely going to be very boring to everyone but me.
Possession has always fascinated me. It's irrelevant to me whether it is supernatural or psychological. But recently I started wondering why the phenomenon is popular again, whether in the form of the Fox series The Exorcist, which is inspired by Blatty's novel and the movie from 1973, or whether it comes in the form of movies based on the files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, famous long ago for their involvement with the Amityville case and more recently The Conjuring films and Annabelle.
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