The journal and sometimes blog of author, Joseph L. Selby.
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Witness Protection is Always Funny
Necessary backstory: Every Monday in Nashua is a board-game Meet Up. This is how I met most of my friends when I moved to New England. I showed up thinking it would be three nerds playing Ticket to Ride and it turned out to be twenty awesome people (many of them nerds–like me) playing Ticket…
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iFrames coming around
My website/blog merger is now 95% complete. I ended up keeping (but rephrasing and restructuring) the various lists of work because I find those lists help me choose what to work on next. I got rid of the book covers and blurbs and decided to save those for when I have an actual published book…
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The Bill of Rights c.1791
The general rule is that no sign exists until after someone does what the sign instructs not to do (thus my favorite sign is “Do not lick the C-4”). You should consider the Bill of Rights to the American Constitution much like a sign. The reason why those 10 items were enumerated? Because they happened.…
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Like Edinburgh, England
Let’s begin here: If you’re writing in a contemporary setting, referring to certain foreign nations can rip a reader out of your story if you incorrectly describe that location because you’re an American and you don’t really understand how X country works. Example: United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy. It is not a republic or…
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Relax! (Go to it)
As previously mentioned, I participated in Sara Megibow’s Writer’s Digest webinar last week. She had a lot of good points and went over various features of her clients that caught her attention during the query process (all her clients except for one came through the slush pile). Not all the things she mentioned had to…
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Words and Games
The topic of custom words in fantasy has come up in a variety of places I visit lately (Book Country, et al.), and while I don’t hold it against people who choose to have names for months other than January-December, I find it a distraction and a lot of work for very little return. So…
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A Quick Tutorial
It’s Memorial Day here in the US, a time to honor those that have served in uniform. We have parades. We grill. We post on Facebook that we honor their memory. What I’m finding, however, is that people don’t know how to properly refer to America’s armed forces. I see a lot of “in memory…
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It’s a Code!
Every once in awhile I’m in the mood to write a conspiracy thriller story. So I’m updating a website to a new edition. The editor gives me chapter summaries in a Word doc, which implies they’re all new. But they’re not. Most of them are identical to the previous edition. BUT not all of them…
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Changes are Afoot
I’m in this rock/hard place situation where Webs.com is not keeping pace with technology, specifically the improvements to HTML like iframes. I have changes I want to make to my website that I simply cannot do with webs. It’s showing its age and my site looks much more amateurish than it did three years ago…