Hannibal, MO

I haven’t written for several days because we’ve been working on an inspection of our RV, but this afternoon we took some time off to drive into Hannibal, Missouri from our campground in Monroe City.  There is so much more we would have liked to see, such as the home of the “Unsinkable Molly Brown”, but we only had an hour to look around after having lunch at the Mark Twain Dinette, famous for their Mark Twain fried chicken and homemade root beer.  We went to the historic area where Mark Twain’s home and those of his friends are located. Continue reading

Starting the New Year out with new things

When my nephew, Nate, was young, my sister Lauryn decided to do the gift giving on New Years Eve so that the family could focus on Christ’s birth on Christmas.  She figured it would be appropriate to start the New Year with new things, so the biggest family party of the year has ever since been New Years Eve with Lauryn as the hostess extraordinaire.  The food was always fantastic, but the biggest event was the gift exchange, especially the white elephant exchange.  Her parties were always the highlight of the year. Continue reading

Guest blog: John Greaves III

One of my authors, John Greaves III, offered to do a guest blog for me while I am recovering.  (Thank you, John!)  He asked that I also include links to the Amazon sales pages for his two published books, which I am glad to do to support him in his efforts.  The first book is A Little Lesson in Manners and the second is A Different Kind of Giant.  His topic for this blog is how he found an illustrator for his book cover, and I am including his illustrator’s web link in my list of useful links in the sidebar of my page for anyone who might be interested. Continue reading

Guest blog by John Greaves III

I knew this would be a busy day, so I asked my most recent published author to write about his experience.  John first had me edit a full length book about his characters, Zac and Mya, but then he sent me a short story aimed at introducing his characters ahead of the book.  He has just gotten his short story, Pit Stop, published.  I’m turning it over to John Greaves III from here: Continue reading

Recommendation

Modesty prevents me from singing my own praises, but one of my authors has done so on YouTube!  John Greaves III is in the process of a rewrite on his book for Young Adults called A Different Kind of Giant.  His was the first book my newly formed team tackled together, so the credit goes to Donna and Mark as well.  Here is the link: Continue reading

Repost from John Greaves III

I had taken a break from editing for a few months as we prepared to move from Oregon, and then for the first few months we were in California.  Then I posted a question on LinkedIn about wanting to get some children’s or young adult books to edit, and John Greaves wrote to inquire about me editing his YA book.  Tonight he sent me a post he’d written on his blog, and he gave me permission to repost it here. Continue reading

Fun research!

I had a 45 minute call with my business mentor, Elge Premeau, today.  She was very pleased with my web site and my blog.  She’s going to try to help Jamey (my technical administrator) figure out how to make this an RSS feed so I won’t have to e-mail everyone Continue reading

Girl Genius and Gil

My son, Jamey, is the Chief Technical Officer at Comic Rocket.  They compile lists of web comics (over 2,000 of them!) and make it easy for readers to keep track of multiple comics and stay up to date on the different stories.  There is a comic convention in San Diego coming up in July, and Jamey and his wife, Sarah, are going.  Sarah is a creative Continue reading

Steps for putting together a book


Every Friday, I volunteer at my son’s business – Comic Rocket.  I’ll write more about that later, but first I want to talk about something that will be more pertinent to book authors and creators of graphic novels.

What I do when I volunteer at Comic Rocket is look at web comics and try to rate them for appropriateness using the movie rating system of PG, R, and NC-17.  As was mentioned in the letter of recommendation I posted in yesterday’s blog, my background equips me to help figure out age ranges for books and at my volunteer job I am learning to do that for web comics.

In order to figure out ratings, I have to read a fair way into a comic to be sure something that starts out relatively innocently doesn’t suddenly change, so I am getting to know the comics out there.  I am excited to talk, today, about the web site of one web comic/graphic novel that can help writers of graphic novels in particular, and books in general.

reMIND by Jason Brubaker is a web comic/graphic novel that he wanted to turn into a coffee table book.  According to his web site, he works at Dreamworks Animation in Visual Development by day, and at night he puts on his cape and doubles as an independent graphic novelist and Continue reading