Writers Resources

What Do Mistakes Say About Writers?

~ davidbiddle ~ Leave a comment
Photo by Ken Suarez on Unsplash

I have a problem here in this ultra-modern digital screenlife we’re all bouncing through. I can’t arrive at true and realistic final edits for my essays, articles, or even comments until I’ve posted online whatever I’ve composed in draft form offline.

For blog posts especially, I don’t fully catch typos and grammatical mistakes until I’m looking at my work with the awareness that there may well be real, live, anonymous people reading me out their in a big cruel opinionated world. Sometimes I catch structural problems in my work I should have seen from the beginning — maybe the need to move sentences into new positions, or ways to cut sections that I couldn’t see until the dang thing had gone global.

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Spilling Your Guts: Writing That Makes a Beautiful Mess

~ davidbiddle ~ 1 Comment

The author with his cocker spaniel, 1978.
The author with his cocker spaniel, 1978.

It took me at least a year of college to learn to live with my Midwestern sincerity. I went to a school on the West Coast full of super smart people. That was bad enough — being kind of average intelligence on a campus full of freaking geniuses. But on top of that a lot of my peers were from LA, The Bay Area, NYC and the Boston area. Each of those regions has its own version of cynical irony through which to approach life. I hadn’t learned cynical irony yet.

To say the least, then, I was a fish out of water in my freshman year. It was a hard year. A good high school friend committed suicide two weeks after I last saw him during Christmas break. My girl friend broke up with me because she was having a hard time with the concept of a long distance relationship. And I really felt out-gunned in class Continue reading →

Talking Indie Addendum: More On Making it Through the Indie Slush World

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

“DOH” © HOBVIAS SUDONEIGHM

My first “Talking Indie” column, “Sorry, Your Buddies Won’t Buy Your Book,” was published today at the online magazine Talking Writing. If you haven’t read it, you can check it out HERE. It’s all about getting over the friends and family hump when you first step into the dark and stormy night of marketing in the book world.

Very quickly, I want to add a couple major items that this article implies for anyone looking for nuggets of wisdom on independent publishing in this new frontier.

1. Do Your Homework

There are some incredibly informative blogs and websites out there written by experienced and insightful Indie Authors and book marketing professionals. You really need to spend a few months Continue reading →