Angelic Rodgers
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Frugal Editing Tools

8/20/2020

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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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April Reading

5/5/2020

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Three books seems to be about all I can get through during COVID-19 in a month.

  • I liked The Outsider best before it slipped into the paranormal. And, yes, I know, I should always expect that slide. However here it seems incomplete to me. Lots of threads picked up from other stories and a LOT of pop culture references like what folks watched on TV or what music they listened to. Lately, I always feel King could and should be edited down by about 1/3rd of the text.
  • Last month I purchased Debbie Nathan's Satan's Silence after listening to the Uncover podcast season on Satanic Panic. Interestingly, the book is not available on Amazon, I suspect because a lot of SRA believers have tagged it as "inappropriate." I did find it on eBooks.com for sale (and the site looks legitimate--check it out if you are interested in a sales site for ebooks that isn't 'Zon). Sybil Exposed was a great listen from the library and if you've seen the movie version with Sally Field, you might find Nathan's uncovering of the truth behind the book interesting (and oddly comforting--that movie haunts me).
  • Thief River Falls was a fairly quick read. I've read a couple of other Brian Freeman books, and while this one wasn't my favorite, I still say it's worth a look if you're into psychological thrillers. And, it appears to be on sale right now for $1.99.
  • Books I didn't finish in April: Interview with a Vampire (Rice), Glass Houses (Caine), Trapped (Konrath). I'll likely revisit/return to Trapped, but it may take me a bit. I'm reading an upcoming release for a Reedsy Discovery Review that won't drop until June, as well as some other stuff related to Octave Thanet.

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.
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February Reads

3/4/2020

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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!
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January: A month of ensemble novels and a non-fiction book on serial killers

1/30/2020

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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.

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Reading Indie: Deviant Behaviors 1-3 by Adan Ramie

9/13/2018

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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.

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Time to play The Fool.

9/6/2018

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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. 

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Exclusivity Pondering

4/24/2018

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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.

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Possession

12/5/2017

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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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