A Heaven for Toasters Wins Award
Last week, I got some exciting news: my romantic sci-fi novel, A Heaven for Toasters, had won second place in the 2020 International Digital Awards! Organized by the Oklahoma Romance Writers of America, this is an annual competition for the top romance book in various...
Bizarre Weapons: the Lantern Shield
Robert Arthurs reports on Quora first seeing this wonder of medieval over-specialization on display in Vienna, Austria: Doesn't it look awesome? Well, looks can be deceiving. You see that small hole in the top region of the shield? That is where a soldier would put a...
The Dispilio Tablet- Revising the Origins and Development of Writing
How old is writing? If we believe the common narrative, writing emerged in Sumeria in the third millennium BC. Others consider the Jiahu symbols from China or the Vinča symbols from Serbia as examples as the first writing. However, new archeological data keeps...
Infographic: How Do Colors Affect Purchases?
I have written in the past about how to use color in your book covers and how color can boost your book sales. Today, I came across a Kissmetrics infographic on LexisClick (thanks to Mike Guess of InSync Media for the tip). The infographic includes a ton of useful...
Top 10 SEO Tools That Are Helpful for Authors
As authors, we all have our websites. More often than not, however, they fail to generate much interest. Most of our posts languish unnoticed and unread. Some writers resort to ads to garner traffic. Others prefer organic—i.e. unpaid—traffic, as our marketing budgets...
Tips for Avoiding Grammar Mistakes
Checking out grammar mistakes is quite easy—but only when you are not editing and proofreading your work by yourself. Otherwise, it’s almost impossible to catch things that would jump out of the page right away, were they written by someone else. Sadly enough, typos...
Five Paintings That Disappeared Without a Trace
Art and art heists seem to go hand-in-hand. No wonder then that some of the rarest masterpieces of art have disappeared at different points in history under mysterious circumstances, leaving the cognoscenti speechless to date. Only reproductions exist today, thanks to...
5 Steps for a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
First of all, thank you all for your wonderful support. I'm lucky to have such a group of awesome people in my life. I'm returning today with a post on a topic dear to my heart: writing content. 2020 has been hard on everyone. Lockdowns, restrictions, and the pandemic...
A Few Days Off
Apologies for the brief hiatus. My dad passed last week from a sudden heart attack. He was on his feet until the very last moment, and we're grateful for that. Still, the shock was great. He left no will, so my mom and I now have to go through a small forest of red...
Basing Your High-Fantasy Towns and Cities in the Real World
I wisely started the map and made the story fit. The above words, spoken by none other than J.R.R Tolkien, have been taken as sage advice by many an accomplished – or budding – fantasy writer who felt inspired to create their own world. While Tolkien, like many...
Bathing in the Middle Ages
Continuing with my last post's theme on bathing through history, this one deals specifically with bathing in the Middle Ages. While the Crusades are generally blamed for a number of things, they triggered significant advances in the West. Indeed, some scholars think...
A Brief History of Bathing
A reader of my fantasy sci-fi series, Pearseus, once joked that I have a strange fascination with showers. And it's true; I think of them as a great example of things we take for granted but are actually pretty new. In this day and age, we enjoy a lot of conveniences...