My Latest Blogs

My Morley Safer story

Okay. So my story is a few degrees of separation from Morley himself. Here goes. About a dozen years ago, the Hartford Courant and Poynter  cohosted an all-genre writers' seminar day. That was shortly after 9/11 and just before Poynter set up NewsU, to shift its...

Coding for old school novelists

This wasn't my usual writer's workshop. As an old school journalist and a storyteller, I'm trained to put words together with a purpose in mind for an audience to either consider or take action or feel emotions, in other words, be informed or entertained. Likewise,...

Appearances

I enjoy meeting other writers and readers and horse lovers. If you hit that particular trifecta, we are paisan. If not, that's okay. We'll still have a grand time chatting. Everyone loves a good story. You can tell me your favorites. Also, very important: this...

Where the action is

Hello, again! Quick Update! We survived The Great Website and Domain Migration. Well, except for a few casualties, such as all the images from all the blog posts on both websites.Many are in the Gallery section of the dashboard, but not all. So, I need to replace them...

News: Third Place in a Contest!

I'm psyched to report the first twenty pages of my mystery-in-progress FATAL IMAGE won third place in the Mystery/Suspense category of the 2015 New England Readers Award for Unpublished Work. My sample pages came in behind those written by Maya Corrigan and Sarah...

Broken Link Blues

I spent Saturday, May, 30, at the UPublishU conference associated with the 2015 Book Expo America in New York. One of the presentations included information about SEO, aka Search Engine Optimization. One of my many takeaways from the sessions is: Google penalizes...

SWOT what?

It's a noun, not a verb. A few years ago, a young marketing exec joined one of my local writers' groups. Jennifer Fusco was determined to write fiction for publication, so she joined Connecticut Romance Writers Association (CTRWA). A North Carolina native, she spoke...

Who you gonna call?

Do-It-Yourself is great, until you get in over your head. When I was updating "plug-ins" on The Horsey Set Net, the blog crashed. When I returned to the blog's WordPress dashboard, a white screen of error messages confronted me. I logged off and rebooted the computer,...

Camera shy in the age of social media? Tips!

Most of my writer pals step up to smile at the camera's unblinking eye. God bless 'em. I sure have a terrible time doing it. Maybe it's a holdover from my old job? Then ... Back in the day, I worked for a daily newspaper. Although I was a General Assignment Reporter...

Book Expo America Survival Tips

BEA is the annual publishing industry trade show, usually held in New York, NY, but will reportedly move to Chicago for 2016. (Ed. Note: When I wrote the first draft of this post, BEA Chicago was slated for 2015, so details can change.) Publishers and organizations...