Timothy's Thoughts

In the current system, just before a book's release date, an author or a publisher will send out review copies of a book, hoping to generate buzz. They want the book to sell well, from day one. Bloggers across the Internet post a review on their site and their readers, the author hopes, will go out and buy the book. The problem that I see with this is that people who read don't time their purchases around when a publisher releases a book. A few authors may have fans anxiously waiting for the next release, but most authors don't. People who read a lot may go ahead and purchase the book, knowing they will get to it eventually, but many won't buy a book until they are ready to read it. That may be weeks, months or years after the release date. I see so many reviews that I mostly ignore them. I happened to scroll through the reviews at novelreviews.blogspot.com. Most of what I saw didn't interest me, but I noticed a review of My Heart Remembers, from fifteen day...

Brandilyn Collins has been writing a series of posts about the rules of writing. In a recent post she discusses the rule Avoid Using “to be” Forms in Narrative . As I worded my comment (for which I probably owe her an apology for being so lengthy) I began to think about the power of “to be” verbs. The Problem With the Forms of Be You probably learned the Be Verbs in English. They are, am , is , are , was , were , been , being and be . We often say that they are weak verbs, but that is inaccurate, as I will show later. What we actually mean is that they appear repetitive, they hinder clarity and they lack action. In sort, when they are used carelessly, they produce writing that is boring, passive and static. Repetition The sun was bright. The air was warm. The day was beautiful. Here we see three sentences and they all have the same verb. There is nothing wrong with any of these sentences, but they lack variety and while the scene is light and airy the repetition drags it down and mak...