Eight Tips For Writing Explosive Action Scenes

Tracy Lawson, who’s a choreographer in her day job, as well as a writer, has written an interesting blog post on choreographing action scenes. One thing I particularly likes was the way she said it meant actions could be shown, through the senses, rather than told.
Other tips she shared included advancing the story through the characters’ movements, making sure body language is appropriate, field testing your scenes, and using maps to orient yourself in the action.
This article is well worth reading.
http://www.bookdaily.com/authorresource/blog/post/1715186


Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

The top 20 misspelled words quiz

It's time to test yourself? How well did you do?

PS. Yes, I got them all correct.


http://bitecharge.com/play/top20/h5


Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Marie Force’s Reader Survey

Ms. Force is careful to say that her survey isn’t scientific. She sent it out into the world and it’s a compilation of those readers who responded to it. However, since almost 6000 readers filled the survey in, it’s well worth spending a few minutes reading the executive summary if not the entire document.

Note: All these percentages and numbers are of those who replied to the survey, not of the total population.

51% of readers are between the ages of 36 and 55.
95% are women.
Contemporary fiction is the most popular genre and Kindle the most popular ebook format.
Facebook is also the most popular way for readers to get information about authors (69%). Author websites came in second at 53%.

Free books continue to be a good way for authors to introduce themselves to new readers. 40% of readers said a free book introduced them to a new author they wouldn’t otherwise have tried.

For the full story see here: https://marieforce.com/images/docs/2015ReaderSurveyExecSummary.pdf

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

The $19billion typo

An American nuclear waste facility, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, took 20 years and $19 billion to build and a simple typo has shut it down. A radioactive drum burst open on Valentine’s Day last year. Drums of radioactive material were trucked in from around the US, where they were placed in salt caverns that would eventually be collapsed, burying the waste.

But investigations have shown that instead of INorganic (clay) kitty litter being added to the contents of the drums to stabilize it, a revised policy manual in 2012 instructed workers at the laboratory to use organic kitty litter to soak up excess liquid in drums of nitrate salts.

Which in turn led to the inevitable kaboom. A site that was supposed to last for 10,000 years is now being closed after just fifteen years.

It really would have been much cheaper to get their manual edited and proofread professionally by a couple of grammar Nazis.

The full story is here: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/eric-schlosser-exposes-our-nuclear-delusions-at-festival-of-dangerous-ideas/story-fn5fsgyc-1227478302666


*Bonus points to anyone who noticed the typo in the picture.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.