Friday, 30 March 2012


also known as “Spunk On A Stick” is having her first blogfest. We are to list the songs that move your spirit, cut deep into your soul, and threaten to break your heart. Ones that we write to for sadness inspiration. Here are my choices:




Small Bump is a song about losing a baby. It's very sad.

Wednesday, 28 March 2012

Forensic News: You can tell sex by fingerprints!


Dr Kewal Krishan of the Department of Anthropology, Panjab University has found a way to determine the sex of a criminal by their fingerprints.


Why is this helpful? Well, obviously it will help narrow the suspects down to either sex.
"The goal of this study is to determine the gender based on finger ridge count within a well-defined area. Rolled fingerprints were taken from 550 subjects (275 men and 275 women) belonging to South Indian population all within the age range of 18–65 years.
Results show that women have a significantly higher ridge count than men. Application of Baye’s theorem suggests that a fingerprint possessing ridge density <13 ridges/25 mm2 is most likely to be of male origin. Likewise, a fingerprint having ridge count >14 ridges/25 mm2 are most likely to be of female origin. These results are helpful as a tool for fingerprint experts as they can be used as a presumptive indicator of gender based on the degree of ridge density."

Source: http://www.jflmjournal.org/article/S1752-928X%2811%2900012-6/abstract
Picture Source: https://www.idfpr.com/DPR/images/fingerprint.gif

Tuesday, 27 March 2012

Thank you, Becky!

The lovely Becky Povich gave me a wonderful gift--you can see for yourself how beautiful the books, bookmark, folder and bird are. I just got it yesterday! Thank you so much, Becky!
Becky's blog has Nostalgic Sundays where she shows historical things from the pas. For example, last week she showed us a journal she purchased from Ebay from Parks College in the 1940s to 1960s. Also, her blog has wonderful writer news and interviews. Check it out!

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

How A-Z Fits into my Marketing Plan

I was inspired by the A-Z challenge Damyanti from Amlokiblogs did last year. At the end of the month, she had material to make up a book which she then went on to publish. I want to do the same thing this year.

My theme: I'm a crime writer, so I wanted to come up with a theme along this line. I decide to make each post based on an unusual way to die from each letter of the alphabet.

As an example, death by Air or death by Molasses. Each short story will be based on a true account of an unusual death or ways people died. Although the stories will only be based on a true account, they will be both interesting and informative.

And there's a contest!

If my readers can provide the correct event or person that died in that unusual way, they will collect a point and each person can collect up to twenty-six points. The top five will each receive a ten dollar amazon gift card or certificate at the end of the month.

Monday, 19 March 2012

My Marketing Plan until May 1st

So, here it is, my marketing plan:  

I'm pretty much doing nothing.

What!?

I'm not going to do an Amazon Chart Rush or a blog tour or any sort of social media marketing. Not really.

Why?

  1. The honest truth is, I don't have the energy. I have seen all the work Talli and Alex and many of my writer friends have gone through to promote their books and I think the work would kill me. Especially with A-Z coming up and the daily blogging that comes with that.
  2. Also, I write crime fiction. Although many of my followers do like mysteries, sadly, it's not the more popular (YA or Fantasy or Sci-fi) reads. 
  3. Third, most of my blog followers are writers (of other genres) and so not really my target audience. Really, doing a lot of marketing on my site wont help sell my genre much. And, I wouldn't want my fellow writers to have to read something they normally would never pick up from a bookstore.
So what am I going to do until May?

(a) I'm going to use the A-Z Challenge to promote my book somewhat, but by using interesting posts to hopefully attract readers of my genre (more about that on Wednesday)
(b) A contest with great prizes (Amazon gift cards) as part of the A-Z challenge - hopefully to attract readers of my genre to my site
(c) Some banners and covers to put up on MY blog. I won't make you put it up on your blog unless you want to.
(d) And, I'm going to enjoy myself by visiting lots of A-Z blogs!

I hope to sell a lot of books and get great reviews but I love blogging because it's a way of staying in touch with fellow writers. The last thing I want to hear (or see) is myself and my book for a whole month and a half.

 Lastly, I'm going to keep writing because that's what I do best!

Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Cover Reveal and Release Date

First of all, I want to thank all of my fellow bloggers for all their help making this happen. What help? you may ask. Well, you've been my writing family, your blog posts and reassurances have been so encouraging. I have become a better writer since blogging. Thank you!

Here is my new cover! I'm excited to reveal it. And, I just got word, my release date is

May 1, 2012!

The Sholes Key by Clarissa Draper

 Summary:

All across London, single mothers are vanishing. Margaret Hill, mother of two, walked out of her house two months before, never seen again. A month later, Carrie-Anne Morgans takes her two-year-old son for a walk in the park and disappears leaving him alone in his stroller. Lorna McCauley leaves her London flat in the early hours of the morning to buy medicine for her sick child and disappears.
Newly promoted Detective Inspector Theophilus Blackwell is assigned the case of Lorna McCauley, which, on the outside seems to be a simple case of mid-life crisis and child abandonment.
Elsewhere in London, MI5 analyst, Sophia Evans, is working undercover to catch an animal rights group responsible for targeted bombings. As her case (and her personal life) fall to pieces, she receives a strange envelope in the mail. It contains a picture of Lorna McCauley’s lifeless face along with a daunting code.
Now the police and MI5 are forced to work together to stop the murders, and Sophia must find her way into the terrifying mind of a serial killer.
I have been studying the marketing plans of many different writers over the last few months, trying to decide what to do. Alex and Talli have both had huge marketing plans with large success. Here are some of the options for marketing out there:

(a) Amazon Chart Rush - this is where bloggers ask other bloggers to buy their book on the same day in order to have their book placed high on the amazon charts.
(b) Facebook/Twitter/Goodreads Marketing - not exactly sure how this works. I guess it's when you tweet or post about your book on these sites.
(c) Guest Blogging/Blog Tours - authors visit other bloggers to promote their book

I think I have decided what I'm going to do in terms of marketing and I will reveal it next week. 

In the meantime, here are some great articles on marketing I found:

Coming up: (next Monday) My Marketing Plan UNTIL May 1st
Coming up: (next Wednesday) How A-Z Fits into my Marketing Plan
Coming up: (next Friday) My Marketing Plan AFTER May 1st

Friday, 9 March 2012

When the story is done, it's done!

I've been relying too much on word count, adding fluff to make my stories longer. However, it's bringing me down--I'm not happy when I add that extra word or line or paragraph. I can't force it.

When the story is done, just add two more words:

The End.

Wednesday, 7 March 2012

The Classics Club



Jillian of A Room of One’s Own is hosting a book club, named The Classics Club. The idea is for individual readers to set a goal to read a certain number of classics over a certain period of time (say, 50 classics over a period of five years). The club is intended to be very casual–pick your own list, no stress, no major requirements, etc.–and it sounds like a lot of fun.

My goal is to read the following fifty classics over the next five years and I think I can succeed because I usually read around fifty books a year. Some of the books on the list will be re-reads for me, but, I forget a lot of them so I'm happy to re-read.

Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility
Persuasion
Emma
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey
Pride & Prejudice

Anne Brontë
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Agnes Grey

Charlotte Brontë
Villette
Shirley

Elizabeth Gaskell
Cranford 
North & South

Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Charles Dickens
David Copperfield
Bleak House
Oliver Twist
Great Expectations

Edith Wharton
A House of Mirth

Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca
My Cousin Rachel

George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss
Middlemarch
Silas Marner

F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise

Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Far From the Madding Crowd

Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
What Maisie Knew
The Awkward Age

D.H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers
The Rainbow 

Elizabeth Bowen
The Death of the Heart

W. Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
The Razor’s Edge
Cakes and Ale

Mary Shelley
Frankenstein

Betty Smith
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair

Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own
Mrs. Dalloway

Margaret Atwood
Handmaid's Tale

Mary Woolstencraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
 
Yasunari Kawabata
Thousand Cranes

James Clavel
Shogun

Kate Chopin
The Awakening

John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men
The Grapes of Wrath
Cannery Row

Walter Scott
Lady of the Lake

Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Monday, 5 March 2012

Banquet Speech by William Faulkner

Remember my last post where I said that William Faulkner's 1949 Nobel Prize, his acceptance speech was greeted with only polite applause because it was virtually unintelligible to the audience. Well, I wanted to hear it. And really, it's not too bad. Take a listen... (the words are written below) It's an amazing speech.


Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969 

Picture source: http://boatagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html 

Also, I read a wonderful book this weekend. It's Dark is the Sky by Jessica Chambers. Pick it up today on amazon.com.

My review: I just loved the characters in this book--they are family and as such, provide a great deal of excitement, each so different, with their own set of problems and quirks.

This book will appeal not only to the mystery lover--with lots of suspects all stuck together in one house, carrying their secrets and motives--but will also appeal to the reader in search of drama and a bit of a love story as well.

Reminds me of a VC Andrews novel.

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