Top 10 Favorite Blog Posts from the Decade!
Well, would you look at that! I made the Anaiah Press Top Ten Blog Posts List. Click on the link and check out #3!
Thanks to Anaiah Press for providing a forum for new and unknown authors!
Blessings,
Linda
As a year comes to an end, and a new one begins, we always like to look at what went well in the past. Now, after a decade, there’s some deep reflection being made. After scouring our blog and social media posts, we’ve come to find trends and popular posts.
Here’s a run down for 2019: We had 118 posts, incorporating a total of 65,157 words (Wow! That’s a whole book!). We’ve had the most likes on our posts more this year than any other year! (Yay!) Our comments are down, so we’d love to have a chat with you! Please comment away!
Overall, we have so many great posts between 2014 (opening year of our blog) – 2019 that we wanted to reshare our most popular writing tips blog posts from the last decade. If there’s something good, why not revisit it? We will share daily on social media…
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David had an endoscopic examination of his upper GI tract last week. The doctor was concerned because of some recent weight fluctuations. She ordered the test in spite of our explanations that he had stepped on the scale wearing a jacket with a cell phone, wallet, and other weighty items in the pockets during one visit and a T-shirt the next time. So, Friday morning we left the house in the driving rain and made the trek to the VA in Dallas. The traffic was backed up, the parking lot was full except in the very back, and the day surgery was the building where we weren’t, but we made it within minutes of our scheduled arrival time.
In this day of tablets and ebooks, I believe that many readers still prefer the experience of paper and ink. Several recent events gave me the chance to confirm that belief while meeting and getting to know some of those readers better. In a ten day period, I had a book signing at a local flower and gift shop, I attended a book club meeting where the first of my two novels was discussed, and I had a table in the exhibit building at our local county fair. Writing can be a lonely pursuit until the author moves out from behind her keyboard and interacts with the lives she touches. It was so much fun to talk with people about my life and theirs, and it was especially fulfilling to hear from those who had read my words and had been touched by them. And it was encouraging to meet some who were anxious for me to sign and sell them one or more of my books so they could read what I had to say next.
A Long and Winding Road: A Caregiver’s Tale of Life, Love, and Chaos: The story of the hilarity and chaos and chaos that happen when four people, two of whom have Alzheimer’s, spend seven weeks traveling across the southeastern U.S. in a forty-foot motor home.
Mom’s Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale of Alzheimer’s, Grief, and Comfort: Mom’s goodbye began with a red photo album and ended fifteen years later in a hospital bed in the Alzheimer’s wing of Southridge Village. This is her story and mine. (This is the follow up to Winding Road – the rest of the story.)
Tatia’s Tattoo: As a successful D.C. lawyer, Tatia’s mission in life is to destroy the sex trafficking trade in small-town America. She knows where to find it. She’s been there. Filled with tragedy, crime, redemption, and love, Tatia’s Tattoo is a story that exposes the sordid underbelly of small towns and shines a light of hope on how the evil might be defeated.
Fallen Angel Salvage (Tatia’s Story, Book #2): Tatia and Jesse have a perfect life in Chicago. Her testimony put Eric in prison in Texas twenty years ago. How could anything go wrong? An old black van. A missing child. Tatia and Jesse race through the city streets with a band of bikers while Johnny and Jade dig through the dark web and Detectives Nelson and Martin pound on doors. Will it be enough? Or will their daughter become another statistic?
Karen Musser Nortman, after 22 years as a secondary social studies teacher and 18 years as a test developer, returned to her childhood dream of writing mysteries. Her first series, The Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mysteries, sprouted from numerous camping trips in Iowa and through at least 24 other states. These mysteries center around a group of retirees who camp together and sometimes stumble over dead bodies. Six of the books have been designated IndieBRAG medallion honorees and three have been finalists in Chanticleer CLUE and Mystery and Mayhem contests. Most of the books are based on actual campgrounds.
When I finished my first book in 2012, Bats and Bones, I began looking for an agent. There was some interest and I was really excited when an agent in New York who handles several successful cozy series asked to see the full manuscript. After I sent it, I read that you need to allow an agent at least six months to look at a full manuscript; if they take you on, another year to find a publisher; and another year to actually get the book in print. I was 69 at the time—I was afraid that I might not live long enough to see my book published!
we were pulling our camper through New Mexico a couple of years ago when we were stopped in a roadblock. They were looking for two escaped convicts who they thought may have stowed away in a camper, car trunk, or pickup bed because there is nowhere in that part of New Mexico for anyone to hide along the road. Our camper had been locked since morning and they let us go on. But later I realized that sometimes we forget to lock the outside storage compartments and two of them were big enough for a person. Fortunately, we had no stowaways but the incident became the germ for The Space Invader.
Most of my books have centered around an event, location, and/or activity. The Frannie Shoemaker books include ones about biking, storytellers, county fairs, geocaching, snowstorms, New Mexico and the Michigan UP. Once I decide what the ‘theme’ is, I think about how a crime might be connected to that activity. Geocachers wander around in remote areas looking for hidden caches, so it stands to reason that they might also find a body. (To Cache a Killer) When we toured the Michigan UP, I was intrigued by the glass-bottom boat tours to view shipwrecks, but what if a dead body appeared in the viewing window (Real Actors, Not People)? In Foliage and Fatality, the second Mystery Sisters book, the sisters volunteer to help at a haunted house fund-raiser. What better place to hide a dead body?
Absolutely not. I wanted to get three Mystery Sisters books out to establish the series, and I just finished the third, Double Dutch Death. I have already started the next Frannie, Corpse of Discovery. The location is based on Lewis and Clark State Park on the Missouri River in western Iowa. There is an annual celebration there of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (the Corps of Discovery) and it includes a fur trader reenactment. An event with hatchet throwing contests and knife makers sounds like it has lots of possibilities for a murder.
Kitty is not a celebrity who seeks the spotlight. She is more like Greta Garbo, the Swedish-American movie star of the 1920’s and 30’s who is famous for the line, I want to be alone. Unlike some family pets who never meet a stranger, Kitty hides under the bed when visitors come, and even though she tries to sneak outside occasionally, she seems to prefer watching life go by from behind a pane of glass. However, the rules and regulations of society don’t favor the sensitivities of the recluse, and this week she had to go out into the world.
