Links of the week #20

Happy Saturday! What? It’s Memorial weekend? OMG, what am I doing inside. I have weeding to do, plants to put in the garden, roses to train, books to read, a MS to edit…and more blogs to read 🙂 I have a pretty collection for you today and don’t forget to listen to Jeff’s music selection today. You won’t regret this listen, it’s powerful.

Writer Business

Suzanne Rock at Romance on a Budget shares a tip Do you have Business Cards?

Plots

Darcy Pattison at Fiction Notes had some great reminders 5 Plot Fixes for Peace Makers

Alan Chin posted this week Writing Tip #36 Story Starter Questions. Very interesting collection of 12-questions. A quick test to see if your plot is missing something.

Janice Hardy at The Other Side of the Story had a brilliant line at the beginning of her post on plots this week: “The house is story. Decorating is plot.” Loved the rest of the post too Author, We Have a Problem: 4 Tips on Plotting Your Novel

Dialogue

Writers It The Storm had Tiffany Lawson Inman yesterday!! Dialogue is King

Editing

Janice Hardy is talking my kind of talk. She uses some simple math and cut and paste to help her in trimming her MS. Interesting read even if you don’t need to trim Break it Down: Trimming Words From a Too-Long Manuscript

Query & 1st Pages

Roni Loren answered What Will Make An Agent Gong Your Pages, tips from the DFW Writer’s Conference

Grammar

DIY MFA spelled out the different ways to punctuate dialog. It’s easy to see the differences in this post: Demystifying Dialogue: Perfect Your Punctuation and went on to the Nine NO’s of Dialogue

Pitch

Vickie Motter from Navigating the Slush Pile described the points of the pitch and how it’s different from your query: May Conferences: The Verbal Pitch. Don’t miss her next post either for help with the twitter pitch Speaking of pitching…

Social Media

Ashley Barron added another post in a series and this one includes hashtag strategy #helpful 🙂 Blogging: Twitter & The Hashtag

Roz Morris was over at Author’s Electric this week with some good reminders: How to get on well with Twitter – by Roz Morris

Music from Jeff

This is a tune called “Surely” from the group Black Dub. It’s Daniel Lanois’ passion project. He’s a super famous producer (U2, Bob Dylan, the list goes on and on) known for his warm and unique sounds. He’s also a great guitarist, songwriter, and singer.

He formed this group after he heard the singer, Trixie Whitley, during a recording session. Her father was a famous singer/guitarist/songwriter named Chris Whitley who, sadly, passed away several years ago. It’s clear that she has music in her blood – an incredible talent.

The drummer is one of my absolute faves, Brian Blade. He became known as a jazz player but has since played with quite a vast array of artists (Seal, Joni Mitchell, etc…). He has his own groups – a jazz group where he plays drums and a solo outfit where he sings, writes the tunes and plays guitar. He’s an unbelievable musician!

So, you can see that with this sort of line up the music is going to be amazing, and it really is! With all of these unique voices they still have such a great group sound. I think they record live together most of time which is very cool and a bit of a lost art. I think it really comes through on the record – a live vibe, real musicians reacting and playing together in the moment.

Hope you enjoy it!