For Publishers

Welcome! I love to dream up stories, mostly in novel form, and I like helping others with nonfiction articles. My fiction spans genres, but my current project, Salvage, is science fiction. Further details below.

How to Move Forward with Your Writing Even If in Fractional Increments

by Cindy Rae

Experts talk about writing every day, or having a writing goal per week, or even praise writers who work the job as close to full-time as they can get.

Yet, so many of us struggling as writers fit our writing into fractions of time throughout a season of life, around kids, chores, full-time jobs, crises, tragedy, and trauma.

Is it possible to become a successful writer when your time spent writing is scattered over various minutes stolen here and there in a demanding life?

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Back to Work: Part 1

by Cindy Rae

Thinking Outside the Box

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us;
And confirm for us the work of our hands;
Yes, confirm the work of our hands.

Psalm 90:17

Introduction

Re-entering the workforce can seem daunting. But, take heart – God is with you.

More options than ever before exist to work remotely, working from home or elsewhere.

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Business Plan Overview

by Cindy Rae

Will this post help you with the business side of writing?

Despite my oh-so-limited time to spend on anything writing related, I am treating my writing as a business. I’ve had a business plan from the beginning. Not a professional, capture-venture-capital kind of business plan, but a comprehensive guide to my own efforts to be successful. It’s an ever-evolving document as I flesh out details.

This is the first in a series of posts about my business plan. Hope it helps!

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Writing a Novel and Writing Code Share…

by Cindy Rae

…an astounding ambiguity with terminology.  You’d think, as long as writing has been around, those in the publishing industry would have agreed to standard definitions, a standard vocabulary.  Not so.

And, surprisingly, neither has the software industry.  Software being considered more of a science, one would expect practitioners to have agreed on common terms.  Yet, even what title you call one who codes, develops, and engineers software varies: software engineer, programmer, software developer, systems engineer, systems analyst, and many more.

So, with those who read a book in draft form one can have critiquers, alpha-readers, beta-readers, writing partners, mentors, development editors, line-by-line editors, and more.

One might argue that each of these titles connotes a different flavor of responsibility, but the lines are definitely blurred.

Writing is a Business: I Have to Talk to Other People?

by Cindy Rae

Come on, you know you know some introverts or shy folks.  Maybe you are even one yourself, like me.

The core of writing is a solitary pursuit, but most of us want financial return.  Part of treating writing as a business is networking with other writers.

How do you go about this?  What are some first steps?  What options will work for you?

Many options exist.  Here are a few:

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by Cindy Rae

A road dead-ended quietly into a drab yellow stone plaza.  Several structures of the same dusty dingy yellow stone, hundreds of years old, surrounded the plaza.  Footfalls raised stale puffs of dust with each step.

To the east in the gloom stood doors to an old frayed church huddled against its larger looming neighbor.  It was also made of the stone, but the thick, tall doors rose in dark wood gleaming despite the dust in the growing dark.

The air around lay dry and still.  No wind blew, no breeze teased the dust.

The entrance reached over their heads.  At a glance, the dark doors were at least nine feet.  A pediment of sorts crawled and curled and curved its way up and over the doors in a half-moon arc.  Inside the pediment’s half-moon shined defiantly two quarters of stained glass, like slitted eyes of a baleful being staring out from the church.