Random Secrets About Me and Writing

1. When I was 12, I once was a runner-up in a national short story contest that was advertised in Seventeen magazine. The company sponsoring the contest was Sanrio, creator of Hello Kitty. I wrote a story about Hello Kitty magically traveling to fantastical lands. Sadly, I can't locate a copy of that story :(

2. I used to (and sometimes still do) write song lyrics. In fact, I started writing song lyrics when I was 11 up until age 20 or so. I would have dozens upon dozens of notesbooks filled with song lyrics. Some people have used them for their own music but no hit records yet :P

3. In college, I would rarely edit/revise or even proofread any of my papers. However, I would manically revise, edit, and proofread all the short stories and screenplays and novellas that I written for myself at the same time.

4. I find screenwriting really hard. You can't wander around in sub plots too much! I'm a big fan of sub plots, by the way.

5. Going to the library still excites me today. Buying new cds used to be exciting to me but not so much anymore :( When I was a young teen, each time I would get a new cd, I would listen to it in its entirely while studying the song lyrics.

Writer's Resources Evaluated

Writer's Resources Evaluated

Sidenote: I decided to give away free digital copies of my book, Thinks and Things, just a consideration to take in when viewing some of my stats.

1. smashwords.com

I just recently joined and I've already had some noticeable success with this site. I uploaded my story (easy conversion tool-it converts your book to at least seven different formats. (Although, I need to tweak the formatting of my story so it looks nice on people's electronic reading devices-please hold off on downloading mine for another day so I can tweak the formatting-no tabs, huh?).

If you're accepted into their premium catalog  http://www.smashwords.com/distribution, you can obtain a free or relatively cheap ($10) ISBN number.

The site also has a dashboard, where you can view your statistics. As of today, here's some of my stats:

51 Downloads
3 Linked in Member's Libraries

And keep in mind, I uploaded my story less than 48 hours ago. It's is offered free but I haven't seen that much traffic/interest to my book with the next writer's resource I'm going to talk about.

2. Lulu.com

Lulu is a site I'm been somewhat familiar with for years. I uploaded my book a few weeks ago and as far as I can make out, I have not moved a single unit, despite my book being a free digital download.

Since the short time that I've joined Lulu, I've gotten almost about half a dozen spam messages from other writers, trying to sell their works. I wouldn't mind so much, but these messages are so poorly written. I'd share but I don't want to embarrass anyone!

Note to new writers: If you're going to spam people to in an attempt to buy your books, at least use proper capitalization, punctuation, no confusing double negatives, etc. or else the general book buying public will think your book will follow suit. Lord knows that it probably does. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

3. StoryMania

I haven't used this in years but I have one or two stories on there. If you want to read some stories and have your stories read in return, this is a pretty good bet. Beware, if a writer already has your (real) name, you need to sign up with a different name.

This story won me $50 through a scholarship contest at my college. I also plan to include (with some minor character changes) in a new book I'm writing.

4. Writing.com

Again, another good resource for writers who don't want to self-publish quite yet but are ready to share pieces of the work to an audience.

This is a fun site to browse and discover many of their fun little features, such as gift points. Somehow I have
accumulated 485 gift points and I only have one submission on the site. Gift points can be redeemed for
stuff. You can also purchase gift points ($1 gets you 10,000 points). Members can send and receive points as
well.