The settings have disappeared into invisible dots on the left hand side without names.

I am looking forward to my new website.

Friends and followers, please join me at:

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/aprilbrownwrites/

Blog: http://aprilbrownwrites.blogspot.com/

This site will stay up a while longer.  Please join for my first new post on LinkedIn on my new blog and website!

Welcome to the updated April Brown Writes!

Tonight, I am uploading a document on my primary website for authors who use LinkedIn.

Once, LinkedIn didn’t offer much for authors.
Now, it offers a lot!

You can now add new sections in your profile:

It must be nice to have health, wealth, and free time to do anything you so desire.

Of course, I think any normal person would quickly become board if every option was available to them.

Life without health limits.  Wow!  Can you imagine being able to go to any restaurant and eat anything on the menu (Forget price for a minute, it doesn’t matter.)  Someone on a blog post chose to deride a friend for not trying certain types of food.  The poster claimed their friend was using excuses to not try new foods.

Did the poster stop and ask?  While there is a fine line between excuses and valid reasons, did the poster even bother to ask?

Apparently the possibility that she could bleed to death internally is just an excuse.  Apparently the very real possibility that she could swell up and die from asphyxiation is just an excuse to not try new foods.

Now, not knowing the friend, I cannot say.  However, I can say that my friends do not understand my food allergies and it is common for me to just say, I can’t have it.  Perhaps the poster’s friend needs to speak up and say, “Yes I could have it, if I want to die tonight.”  Would that make the poster feel better?

Can you imagine the wealth to do anything you want?  If you were independently wealthy, sure you could keep doing the same old things, knowing they didn’t work, and not caring.

Yet, if you know you can do one part of a job, and not the other, do you keep trying to do the part you have no talent for?  Not unless you are wealthy and don’t care.

Or don’t recognize your strengths and weaknesses.

I’m willing to admit my weaknesses.  I’m a writer, I write for people to enjoy reading.  I am not a salesperson.    However, some people can’t see the difference.  It’s just an excuse.

No.  It’s not an excuse.  I have tried to write sales copy.  I was laughed at.  My cat can do a better job.  Sales copy is one of my weaknesses, and not my strength.

So, does it not make sense to recognize and accept my strengths and weaknesses?  Does it not make sense to allow people who have sales copy as a strength to have a job?  They wouldn’t try to write book.  Except to make fun of writers who can’t write sales copy!

Imagine life with all the free time in the world.  You have time to read every book and watch every movie ever made.  It would get boring quickly.

Life without limits means you could read books that would leave you screaming and crying for weeks after reading it.  After all, you have nothing better to do with life.

Really?  Does being depressed sound like something we should do with our lives?  Why?  Life with limits says we know what we enjoy, and we do what we enjoy within the limits of our lives.

Even though a life without limits sounds like fun, it wouldn’t be.  While I can wish my life wasn’t so limiting in the food department, I know if I want to live, I have to limit my food to items that won’t kill me.   Many people will never understand that.

Not being suicidal is just an excuse to them.

I am sorry for them.

They don’t know their own strengths and weaknesses.  They have all the health, wealth, and time in the world.  Someday, though, karma will visit them.

They will have to face their strengths and weaknesses.  They will have to learn to say ‘no’ to people who can’t understand why they have to say ‘no.’  They will have to face the friend who thinks they just make excuses.   Will they cry themselves to sleep at night, all alone with no one to know, or care, because now they understand?

Am going to, once again,  start working on getting a proposal together for “Relating to Memory Loss – A Guide for Individuals, Family, Friends, and Employers.”

“The Stork Mis-Delivered – Twice” is still out there awaiting hopeful acceptance.  If not, I am beginning to work with one person on improving the query letter process.  Those are always difficult.  Especially on as complex a stroyline as “The Stork Mis-Delivered – Twice.”

I am definitely looking for help with query letters. Thanks to one agent, I have discovered that what I find enticing in a query letter confuses some people, while what they find enticing, makes me go huh?  How is that connected to the story?  So, onward to find an agent who thinks like me.

I have recently had difficulty with my email program.  Or the connection between mine and one or two other people.  What does this mean to me in the query and agent hunt?  Well, if the agent follows the “no response is no” policy that can be a serious problem.  First, I have no idea idea if they received my query.  Second, I have no idea if they sent a response.  If they sent a request, and it got lost in cyberspace, I would never know, as an author is not supposed to attempt to contact an agent who has a “no response is no” policy.

Thankfully one agent recognizes this problem, and recently wrote a blog post in which she admitted to sending an acceptance to three authors email addresses, none of which the author received.  Luckily, she finally reached the author.

Am I likely to query an “no response is no” policy agent?  No.  They could request my manuscript, and I would never never know it.  And just imagine how they would rant, especially on Twitter, against the author who never sent the manuscript they requested.

As for my blog, I wish to try a new approach.  I want to keep the main blog page for writing updates.   However, I am beginning page sections which will have subpages for cooking, sewing, and gardening.  Others  may occur in the future.  A page and subpages for Fibro and healthcare links is likely. I do plan to focus mainly on my writing, with maybe twice a week, blog page updates.

Be on the lookout for new fun on my website!

How do you manage to get Twitter to be more than just a billboard service? How do you manage to know what is going on? I rarely see replies to anything there. I use Hootsuite to separate it into streams, and that helps some. However, since you can’t use page down, and have to scroll, it is easy to lose where you are. I have used Tweetdeck in the past, though it gives me a headache since I can’t see the microscopic fonts.

On one writer’s board, we discussed genre and my writing. Personally, I feel I write adventure stories. Afterall, I like to read adventures, and they are hard to find. One person said basically that adventure is not a genre, and I need to decide what genre they are. Maybe that’s why I have so much trouble finding books I enjoy. One adventure I recently read was hidden in Westerns. I wouldn’t have looked in Westerns for an adventure. Others are just hidden in plain fiction (which in our library is almost all romance).

So in the future of writing and publishing, do you see a place for adventure stories for adults? Stories that are not primarily in romance, westerns, history, or science fiction? Stories that could have happened ten years ago, or ten years in the fututre that are more about the adventure than the science, or the history, or the technology, or the romance?

Perhaps, this afternoon, a quick cast recall might be in order.

Definitely, after hubby’s vacation, I will start with the re-work from chapter 1, regardless of how much more I have written. I already know a few chapters that need to at least double in size. Yes, a few quick notes have been scribbled.

I need to look up a few good resources for writing physical conflict. I tend to skim it while reading, and for some reason, it is vital in this story.

Two new stories begun.

While working with social networking, I found that by linking my blog to HootSuite, I can now update my blog from there, just as easily as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  That will allow me to add updates more often, and more easily.  WordPress is confusing when it wants to be.  Just way too much stuff on it to be simple and easy to use.

Most of my updates will be on the individual page for that story.  I plan to start updating those pages of stories I have worked on at least once a month, on, or about the 15th.  Easy to remember.

Although I spent a month too sick to write, in four months, I have reached 50,000 words on “Into the Volcano.”

The prequel to the prequel is now over 2/3 done! Am working on the prequel outline generally as I go along.

Personally, health is improving with joining a gym (just have to remember not to overdo!)

However, after attempting to write a query letter for two months, and the direct conflicting recommendations,  as well as very little helpful information on what I could do to improve it, I realize that there is no way I can write a query letter that will attract an agent’s attention.

I am a storyteller.   I am not a salesperson.

I have two options: find someone to do the sales for me (agents despise this process if they find out about it), or publish as e-books.

My novella would make a good e-book.  My latest novel would make a good e-book.

“Relating to Memory Loss – A Guide for Individuals, Family, Friends, and Employers” would make an excellent e-book as it would be easy to update.  However, useful resources, references, and links are listed, it cannot be an e-book without a traditional publisher.  The fact of the matter is, as carefully as I verified that authors and websites want to be recognized and visited by others, it would be easy for one to change and list theirs as a “no contact, sorry we don’t exist, please do not use, acknowledge, refer to, or read materials on this site”.  Therefore, this will not be available if I choose to go the e-book publishing route.

When the decision is made to create e-books, I will post updates with links to where to buy them, for a reasonable fee.  I am thinking $3.00 for the novella, and $5.00 for the novel.  About max I pay for books.

I have completed “The Tribal New Beginning” on June 10, 2010.  As a novella, it is not eligible for traditional publication until other novels are published.   It was in production for about two years.

“Relating to Memory Loss – A Guide for Individuals, Family, Friends, and Employers” was completed on October 20, 2010.   This Nonfiction was the shortest writing time of any long item so far, only ten months from start to finish.

“The Stork Mis-Delivered – Twice – is an 81,000 word women’s fiction set in the 1980′s and early 1990′s.  It was completed on December 10, 2010.  It has also been in production for a few years, although in October 2010, it was only 20,000, and much of that was re-vamped.

Currently,  I have begun a more fun project, one that will be the prelude to “Garbage Miners.”  I look forward to the science and history involved in the young adult novel “Into the Volcano.”