I made a short video series about my editing and revision process but never added it to my blog, so here it is: The 5 stages of self editing   Once I’m done with a first rough draft, I go through a 5-step editing process to make sure my book is as good as it can be. Keep in mind, …

This month I’m in Japan and I’ve taken up smoking the pipe. Partly, I enjoy the taste and the ritual. I’ve never gotten into smoking cigarettes and don’t plan to start. And while I understand smoking can be addictive, I’ve not experienced it yet. If you’ve followed Creativindie for awhile, you’ll know I’m a fan for marijuana for creativity and …

The short version: Grammarly finds more typos and actual mistakes. In a full manuscript, it found 7 while ProWritingAid only caught 1. However, ProWritingAid sometimes catches things that Grammarly misses, and has very useful more advanced features that can help improve your writing by flagging slow passages, complex paragraphs, or repetition. I recommend using both before publishing. Grammarly | ProWritingAid Editing …

We first came to Bali last year and spent two months. I enjoyed it, my wife didn’t. That was mostly my fault, for booking hotel rooms instead of villas so she could have a kitchen and her own space (living on a bed kind of sucks for weeks on end). I convinced her to come back. So far it’s not …

I’ve never put much thought into personal branding – I had a bunch of stuff I liked, but I couldn’t put them all together in way that made sense. My first header logo was a dumpster fire. I’ve had to learn to withhold enthusiasm, and add more space, because less is more. I’ve always focused on simple, minimal WordPress websites …

This is a post about authenticity and craft vs. fraud and plagiarism, but it’s not a moral tirade. You can look elsewhere for that. The reason I don’t want to point fingers or make ultimatums is because ethical concerns often ignore market conditions. As we dig deeper into this subject, you’ll find I’m skeptical about demonizing certain tactics in indie …

Netflix’s Velvet Buzzsaw is a fun horror flick based on a nearly universally accepted belief about art: that “real art” is done for the passion, not the money. In this particular version, a dead artist’s paintings come to live and brutally murder his critiques. More than that, Jake Gyllenhaal as a snobby art critique, goes through a character arch of realizing …

Recently someone in one of my Facebook groups wrote how frustrated she was that her books weren’t selling, and she had no idea why. This is almost always because the book isn’t designed to sell to the right audience. What genre is it? Scifi? Fantasy? Contemporary? This has to be immediately clear from the cover and blurb, and you should …

A common question I get in my private facebook group goes like this: “my book is published but I have zero sales and no visibility, and I don’t know anything about book marketing. Should I hire a publicist?” The short answer is NO. A book publicist or book launch specialist will often charge 10K or more, guarantee nothing and focus on …

I made this video in the last few days of Thailand, while in the process of reviewing several dozen applications to write with me – to be fair, none of the samples we received “sucked” … some were infuriatingly “good”, but didn’t hold my attention, were too wordy, trying too hard, overwritten and distracting. I boiled it down to six …