Think like a Pro Playlist Link

This link will take you to all 17 episodes on YouTube for Think like a Pro.

Listen on your favorite Podcast site:

https://eden5695.podbean.com/e/

apple podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-write-focus/id1546738740%20

spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4fMwknmfJhkJxQvaaLQ3Gm?si=0GFku2PbShWXiDhRp7JaDQ

YouTube Channel Writers Ink Books – YouTube

Think like a Pro: New Advent for Writers is copyright 2017, with the revised edition in 2018. Podcast copyright is 2021.

Resources

Purchase Think/Pro at Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Think-like-Pro-Advent-Writers/dp/1983248266/

The Think/Pro planner for writers can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Pro-Planner-M-Lee/dp/1983248673/

Visit thewritefocus.blogspot.com for resources, links and a summary of this and other episodes.

November is the Fall Writing Challenge

November is the Fall Writing Challenge… and The Write Focus has got every writer’s back.

November is writing only, 50,000 words in one month.

Fall on The Write Focus podcast is a series entitled “Enter the Writing Business” Check it out on the TWF website: Click here to go the current posts.

New Publications!

1st and 2nd are TWO Planners for Serious Writers. Visit the links for views of the interior of both planners.

Writing Nest: A Project Planner for Writers

Cover by Deranged Doctor Design
  • Plan those writing goals.
  • Nest the projects; hatch as you achieve them.
  • Celebrate victories; analyze challenges.
  • Soar with Success with the Writing Nest.

Find the Writing Nest here.

Word Trekker: A Writer’s Word Count Planner

  • Write more than ever before.
  • Plan Projects. Plan Weekly Tasks.
  • Track Words. Track Progress.
  • Use the Triple Crown of Hiking as Motivation.

Find the Word Trekker here.

3rd is this ebook / paperback AND coming soon, the audiobook.

A Messy Miscellany For Writers 

A Messy Miscellany for Writers crowds in information about craft and process, productivity and tools, writing crimes to avoid, the how-can’s and why-should’s of writing guidance, and much more.

Offered by M.A. Lee and The Write Focus podcast.

https://books2read.com/u/38ezzB

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6Y5GWG2

ppb https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B713BXGS

Discovering Sentence Craft

Discovering Sentence Craft is celebrating its birthday!

In the forests of words that we writers grow, blazed trails mark the way to our destination. Without those trails, without paths leading down to sun-sparkled streams, without the yellow brushstroke painted on tree after tree, we might lose our direction and our sanity.

Reading through that opening paragraph, most writers will recognize the extended hiking metaphor. Many will spot inversion and alliteration. A few will appreciate the anaphora and auxesis and zeugma, even when not familiar with those terms.

This is Sentence Craft. Controlled use creates appreciative readers. Over-blown use drives readers away.

  • Sentence Craft—from easy imagery to involved structures—is essential for the poet.
  • Bloggers and other nonfiction writers will find it a marketing tool, distinguishing them from their competition.
  • Speech writers and great broadcast journalists use these devices to make their spoken words become memorable.
  • With fiction, writers paint expositions and settings and character tags, capturing readers who may not even recognize the sweeping stroke of the magical wand.

Discovering Sentence Craft is for writers new and old. For newbies, word-tricks can be fascinating ventures into an unknown forest. These tricks can renew a veteran writer’s love of words and sentences flowing onto the page.

In small offerings, of course. Too many tricks glaze our readers’ eyes.

Discovering Sentence Craft covers figurative and interpretive concepts as well as the structural elements that build meaning, emphasis, and memory.

Concepts

I: Figurative

II: Interpretive

Structures

III: Inversion

IV: Repetition

V: Opposition

VI: Sequencing

Writer M.A. Lee believes writing is a skill-based craft which can be learned and practiced. Artists learn composition, perspective, depth, proportion, and shading. A baseball player learns in-field and out-field, pitching vs. throwing, batting and bunting. An electrician learns reading blueprints, voltage and current, circuits, outlets, and panels.

A writer needs much more than grammar and spelling. Reading widely, Discovering Sentence Craft concepts and structures, and practicing them will open doors for anyone who wants to improve.

Check it out here.

Want a Writing Life? Enter the Writing Business

Are you heading into a Fall Writing Challenge? Visit The Write Focus podcast to listen to the Enter the Writing Business series and inspire your writing.

Want a Writing Life?

Enter the Writing Business offers, in eight episodes, everything you need to transition your mindset from a wannabe writer to a pro-writer mindset.

Check out the opening blog post at https://thewritefocus.blogspot.com/2022/10/343-dream-it-enter-writing-business.html

There, we have direct links for the podcast to YouTube and Podbean as well as links to Apple and Spotify.

The Write Focus is also on Samsung Podcasts, Google Play, iHeart Radio, Tune-In, and many many more. Look for our green logo.

Workbook!

A workbook for Enter the Writing Business, book and podcast, is now available.

Visit Emily Dunn / M.A. Lee (buymeacoffee.com) to get yours now!

Here’s the book description for Enter the Writing Business.

How do I succeed at writing? Most answers to that question focus on creativity ~ story development, character explorations, poetic contemplations, blogging topics, and more.

Business needs to be added to that list.

Refine the question ~ How do I succeed at the writing business?

Even our refined question can be divided into several.

  • A] What are the best systems for writers?
  • B] What are the best daily procedures?
  • C] The best ways to balance creativity and practicality?

These are the first decisions to build a writing business.

Think of writing as running a small business. Writers create content ~ stories, poems, blogs, any of our writing. That content is our product to sell.

As creators of quality products, when we want a writing life, we need a Writing Biz.

Imagine a writing career. What is the reality? No, not the fantasy. What will the actual day-to-day writing life be?

Daily writing requires that we find ways to cope with the soul-suckers who interfere with your creative energies.

Enter the Writing Business offers the reality of the writing life.

This guidebook is a series on the daily creative process and the daily devotion to writing. Transitioning to business decisions, wee look at the necessary writing space then the essential hard and soft skills. To succeed, though, we need a business plan designed for writers. That biz plan will direct our daily actions, weekly plans, and monthly reviews and previews :: the Do’s that few consider until swamped by the constant Do-ing of them.

This guidebook is more than a tossed life preserver. With the practicalities discussed here, you can avoid the swim across the channel and build a bridge to cross from newbie to pro writer.

As part of the five-year publication anniversary of her first book, Edie Roones filled last August  with a blog series about these basic business decisions. The last two posts in the series chatter about the Hell and Heaven of Writing to answer every writer’s constant unspoken question: Is it worth it?

Interested in reading rather than listening? Here’s a link to purchase the ebook. On Amazon    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0848CK3C2

A paperback version of Enter the Writing Business is located in the 8 x 10 big bundle Inspiration for WritersThe other books in Inspiration 4 Writers are Just Start Writing and Write a Book in a Month.

Achieve the Writing Life as the Author Did

Most new writers drop out before the five-year mark. Edie Roones (a pseudonym of a professional writer who has published over 50 titles) began her commitment to writing in 2012. “I’ve made mistakes,” she says, “but I’m seeing better results every day.” Avoid those mistakes in actions and expectations, and achieve success applying the lessons in Enter the Writing Business.

Roones’ fantasy series of Seasons in Sansward  has three novels Summer Sieges, Autumn Spells, and Winter Sorcery.  Her most recent endeavor is the Wild Sherwood series, with the two collections Into Wild Sherwood and Outlaws of Wild Sherwood, ten stories than fuse the Robin Hood legends with the Faeries of British myth.

Write to Edie at winkbooks@aol.com

Rewind ~ the Fall 2021 Writing Challenge

Blast from the Past ~ a Fall Writing Challenge from The Write Focus.

October is Preptober for November’s National Novel Writing Month, known commonly as NaNoWriMo.

Originally broadcast in 2021, we here at The Write Focus offer a Blast from the Past for those who are participating in the great writing challenge.

Prepare and Write for the International Writing Challenge

For October, we offer episodes on the prep work for writing all through  November.

For November, we offer updates and inspirational posts.

For December, we cover the steps needed to turn November’s rough draft into a publishable work.

That’s our focus here: inspirations to keep you writing and knowledge to solve your writing issues along with guidance through the publishing process. We’re for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years ago.

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus! We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. 

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

Links become live on the day of the podcast broadcast.

Writing Challenge Episodes

October 6 / 2021 / Episode 2:68 ~ Challenges / listen to the Podcast. Start here to follow along.

October 13 / Episode 2:69 / Preptober 1

October 20 / Episode 2:70 / Preptober 2

October 27 / Episode 2:71 / Preptober 3

November 3 / Episode 2:72 / 4 Recommended Books for Writers

November 10 / Episode 2:73 /3 Essential Tools for Writers

November 17 / Episode 2:74 / 3 Films Every Writer Should Study

November 24 / Episode 2:75 / 5 Writing Crimes to Avoid

December 1 / Episode 2:76 / Gifts for Writers

January 5 / Episode 3:2 /Resolve to be a Writer

January 12 / Episode 3:3 / Revision Is a Process

January 19 / Episode 3:4 / Edit and Correct

January 26 / Episode 3:5 / Publish and Promo

 

 

Brand your Books with Classic Tropes

Used in discussing market copy and branding in Discovering Your Author Brand by M.A. Lee

Covers for Tony Hillerman’s first novel featuring Jim Chee and Detective Leaphorn
Cadfael — the first book in the 20-book series, A Morbid Taste for Bones, by Ellis Peters
Amelia Peabody — the first book in the series by Elizabeth Peters
Head-boiled Detective Covers
Action Adventure with Louis L’Amour and Lester Dent
three covers for my favorite writer Mary Stewart ~ these are the covers that sold me.
Classic Mystery Pulp Writers of the 1930s to 1950s
Victoria Holt ~ vintage gothic
More vintage gothic

Celebrate *Discovering Your Author Brand*

Brands identify quality work with artistic effort. They serve as a stamp of approval for the customer.

It’s the anniversary of Discovering Your Author Brand, the guidebook for developing writing brands for yourself as writer, for your book, and for your series.

Here’s something not sexy. Brands for writing is a contract with the reader.

Here’s two more.

  • Brands identify quality work with artistic effort.
  • They serve as a stamp of approval for the customer.

Yeah, yeah. You’ve heard that before.

Look around, and you’ll spot lots of flash-bang presentations on creating author brands. As more writers become self-published and traditional writers try to increase their marketing, the Author Brand is a hot topic.

Everyone talks about it. Few people can explain how to do it or give instructions to follow.

Well, gee, here’s another book, too.

How is Discovering Your Author Brand different from the other books in the marketplace?

1st ~ It’s packed with examples based on highly successful writers.

Face it, in today’s marketplace, our competition is our peers and every other writer who has come before us. Agatha Christie is still selling. Ray Bradbury is selling. Arthur Conan Doyle sells. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot was made into a Will Smith movie over two decades after Asimov died.

These writers aren’t on the best-seller lists; only new books earn places on those lists. But Christie and Bradbury and Doyle and many, many more writers are competition for everyone else entering the marketplace. And they have the cachet of quality that new and recent writers struggle to achieve.

So, we’ll look at successful brands and analyze the secrets of their success.

2nd ~ Discovering Your Author Brand understands that the browsing readers will only give a few nanoseconds to our books.

So, we explain the three main glances that hook the readers before they swim down the river. We also look at the keys to unlock those glances. With the right keys, the brand is revealed, and the door to the reader opens.

To help with the keys and glances, we have worksheets (charts!) to help you discover the brand for book, series, and your author persona—because the first leads to the last.

3rd ~ We have something the other books don’t have, another way to catch the attention of that swimming reader. Video trailers!

Advertising claims that consumers have to see something seven times—7!—before they’ll buy. Static ads and promo posts are all well and good, but we writers need an extra oomph to get that seventh look. Enter the video trailer.

Have you ever wanted to set up a video trailer or a brief clip, currently big on social media sites like TikTok and Instagram? Have you hesitated because you don’t know where to start?

We have an easily adaptable script as well as guidance on settling the debate between music and narration. (We pick music!)

Discovering Your Author Brand is packed with explanations and examples.

Book 7 in the Discovering set, the manual is designed for new writers on the journey to becoming totally professional.

Purchase at Amazon or purchase at other online distributors

View the trailer at this link: https://youtu.be/uthI5gEWic8

. ~ . ~ . ~ . 

Writer M.A. Lee has been self-publishing fiction and non-fiction since 2015. She has over 50 books published under her three pen names.