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How Authors Can Use Their Networks

Written by in Networking, Research

Remember when networking was so popular there were networking groups everywhere you turned? I was living in Orange County, California, during those days and I belonged to networking organizations like Women In Management and breakfast clubs in which members gave each other job leads and I gave speeches on creativity to a dozen different kinds…

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Concise Writing

Written by in Writing

As I tell the authors whose books I edit, it’s relatively easy to write a whole book. You just do a mind dump. Then you hire me to help you clean it up. It’s that “cleaning it up” part that becomes a challenge. We tend to love our words, especially all those nifty adjectives and…

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Get a Good Computer Keyboard

Written by in Resources for Writers, Writing

Sometimes I think I’m the only person on the planet without a BlackBerry. I must be the only person who doesn’t sit in restaurants or theaters or coffee shops texting to my friends. I’m really boring, I guess—when I’m sitting at a keyboard, it’s right here, and I’m sitting here because I’m writing something I…

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Basic Writing Tools – Dictionaries

Written by in Writing

<A HREF=”http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Ftheidealady%2F8010%2F80124e56-a72b-4c0b-9dee-d592aeb61c50&Operation=NoScript” mce_HREF=”http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Ftheidealady%2F8010%2F80124e56-a72b-4c0b-9dee-d592aeb61c50&Operation=NoScript”>Amazon.com Widgets</A> Last time, I urged you to buy a copy of The Elements of Style, which writers have been using for ninety years. It’s the best book of English usage you can find, and we’ll come back to it. The second most important tool a writer can own is a dictionary. Yes,…

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The Elements of Style

Written by in Writing

I don’t even know how long I’ve been sitting at this computer, or the computers before this one, or the typewriter before the first computer, or the legal pad before that. I was the only member of the Creative Writing Club in my high school to have a new story every single week. In college…

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