Hello SErs. Harmony here. Today I wanted to look at characterisation. Making my characters look, sound, and feel different has always been a challenging part of writing for me, and I’m always on the lookout for new ways to show the many personality types that make up the human species.

I don’t read horoscopes (or horror-scopes, lol) or put much credence in them, but the many star signs do give us a good pointer for personality types we can use for our fictional characters. Depending on where you look, the lists read differently, but they all hold the same core points. Here’s one example of characters related to star sign:

(I took this from https://www.horoscope.com/zodiac-signs)

The above gives you an at-a-glance run down of each characteristic per zodiac sign. If you want to click the link and check this out further, you have the ability to click on each…

Hi, everyone! I hope you’ve had a great start to the new week.

Today I’m happy to introduce a lovely lady who also happens to be a wonderful poet and writer. She has a new release, a poetry book called, Songs of Heartstrings. Please help me welcome, Author, Miriam Hurdle.

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Author, Miriam Hurdle

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About the Author

Miriam Hurdle is an Amazon Best-Selling Author. She writes poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and memoir. Her poems are included in Letters to Gaia, Whispers and Echoes Issue 2, Whispers and Echoes Issue 3, Outcast, and More Words.

She is passionate about poetry and her favorite poets are Robert Frost with his poems “The Road Not Taken,” and Linda Pastan with her poem “To a Daughter Leaving Home.”

Music has rooted in her life. Being a soloist as a teenager led her to taking voice lessons and to have ongoing singing…

I recently discovered DIY Book Design (thank you, Krystallia!) and just had to share the news.

DIY Book Design has a number of useful tools and tutorials, all aimed at helping you produce the perfect image for your book. From a number of tutorials helping with the design of your book cover to taking that cover and transforming it into a great-looking 3D mockup, DIY Book Design has got you covered.

It’s this last feature that caught my eye. You get to choose between a Single and Composite look for your books. The Single look lets you display your book as a Kindle/tablet/mobile/paper standalone image:

The Composite view lets you design a combination featuring various formats:

Generating the mockup is as simple as 1-2-3, as the interface guides you through the entire process. You get the option of creating a white or transparent background for your books. The whole process…

This is a long post aimed at all current writers and those waiting in the wings, so please bear with me.

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A couple of days ago while perusing the latest posts on Facebook, I came across one that my friend and fellow writer, Stuart Aken, had found on a question and answer site called Quora (Google it if you want to find it’s location). Along with a couple of others in the game, Stuart and I added our comments to a query put forth by someone, on the subject of which qualifications were needed to be able to become a writer and to break into the publishing world – Click here to read it.

Together with Stuart’s initial comment on Quora, the ones John Yeoman, Karen Wolfe Whitchurch and myself added on Facebook, hopefully helped to back up Stuart’s views, and to quash the ridiculous notion once and…