Posted in Backstory, Book launches, Book trailers, Fiction Writing, Uncategorized

Launching a new book: It never gets tired!

Anyone who knows me personally or knows my work also knows that I’ve been writing nonfiction for over thirty years. I started my career as a health and medical writer. After moving into medical communication and working as an academic and consultant, my writing focused on communications. I occasionally was able to mesh health and communication in my writing. Some of you still use my textbooks – I know this because I still get royalty cheques!

Now, as a recovering academic, I spend the bulk of my writing time writing fiction. Today, I launch my latest novel, “The Inscrutable Life of Frannie Phillips.”

I never really intended to write this book. In fact, when I finished The Year I Made 12 Dresses that launched six months into the pandemic, I thought I was finished with the main character, Charlotte (Charlie) Hudson. Not so much. Have you ever had a character whisper into your ear? Keep talking in your head? Generally, bug you until you had to write about her again? That’s where Kat’s Kosmic Blues came in. But it seemed she wasn’t finished there.

So, today, I launch The Inscrutable Life of Frannie Phillips and here’s my little launch party where I tell you about writing this book…

And here’s more info…

I’ll now return to my usual blogging: sharing my writing tips, advice and general journey. You might even enjoy reading this book.

Care about people’s approval, and you will be their prisoner.

Lao Tzu

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Writing Advice: Five tips to inspire (and improve) your online research

I’m working on my new novel, and as I research the 1960s, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned about online research over the past 30 years (from before there even was online research…(from the Moonlight Press blog)

Moonlight Press

What do the following two pictures have in common?

Words? Pictures? Ideas? Yes, yes and yes. But they are also both photos of sources I’m using for my new work-in-progress. Yes, they are drastically different in terms of medium. The first two are reference books I’m madly absorbing so that I can recreate the zeitgeist of a moment (or two) in time. The second serves the same purpose, but it’s located on a university library web site among its digitized archives.

When my first nonfiction book was published in 1989 (yes, I’ve been writing for that long), online research was nonexistent. Research required a writer to get up from the desk (or couch), get to the library, spend hours in indices to find the right citations, then hours and hours combing through books, articles, and microfiche readers. Unfamiliar with microfiche? Oh, what you have missed.

A microfiche reader

I used…

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Who’s on first: Understanding who’s who in book editing

There’s a lot of misunderstanding among new writers about the editing process and the specific responsibilities of specific types of professional editors.

I’ve tried to clear a bit of the fog over on the Moonlight Press blog today…

Moonlight Press

by Patricia J. Parsons

Writers write. Editors edit. It’s that simple. Right? Well, not really. Let’s take a trip through the writing-editing process from the beginning of an idea to when a book makes its way into a reader’s hands.

An idea forms in a writer’s head and that writer takes a unique, individualized approach to percolating the idea until it gets to a point of forming a story. Then the writer sits down in front of a computer (or less often, with a pen and paper) and begins to put words on the page. Those words accumulate through the writing process until, sometime down the line, a book is finished. Then what? The editing process begins, and it begins with the writer.

The first draft of anything is shit, or so said Ernest Hemingway. That means regardless of how experienced you are as a writer, you never publish…

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