Category Archives: A blog about the topics of writing

A blog about the topics of writing, Writing Advice

FInding a title for your book: Easy or hard?

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I am close to being done with the final edits for Jasper 4. The manuscript has been done for a while now but the editing process has taken longer than I wanted.

At the moment I do not have a working title. That reminded me of my past titles for my five books that are out. Of the five four were named by someone else. I know how that sounds.

So, I am thinking of ways to title this manuscript. Perhaps a contest, a giveaway or just suck it up and sit down and come up with a title.

It makes me wonder how people come up with titles for their works. If they get help from others or if they are good at figuring it out for themselves.

Some authors will use the main character as a title. Others will use the location of the book. From my titles alone it shows a tease of what is to be found inside between the covers.

One has to make sure that the title is relevant to what a reader will find. If there is a point to your book one can use that.

For example, in Jasper 3 the animals were in peril so I included that in the title. I did get cocky when I finally pulled out a book title on my own. So cocky.

One can’t just slap a title, any title, on your cover. It represents your work and it needs to correlate to the material

So I am back at square one in figuring out a title for this book. Hopefully, something will come to mind soon.

A blog about the topics of writing

My computer is female: She doesn’t like me

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As writers, we need to have a good working relationship with our computer. We need it to work just about flawlessly as we craft and mold our next novel.

However, I have noticed something occurring over the last few years. I discovered my computer is female. Yes, I know it is an object, and objects don’t have gender.

Let me explain.

My desktop and I have a decent work symbiotic thing going on. Well, until it decides it doesn’t want to work for me.

It seems over the last few years, my computer, on occasions, will break down or have an issue that I need to figure out. One where I will try the tricks of the trade I have learned over the years. Sometimes that works. Most times, it does not.

When all else fails, I ask my husband for help. To say he is a whiz with computers is a true understatement. He will sit down and try to do the same function that I tried and could not accomplish. He will do a complete analysis on other days and find there is nothing wrong with it. User error? Sometimes I am sure. But not all the time.

Here is one example that happened last week. I tried to print a recipe out. It was one sheet long. I hit print, and nothing happened. When my husband sat down, he asked me to show him what I did. He did the same thing. It worked for him.

What happens is it will work for him a large percentage of the time.

On. The.First.Try.

Yes, I will get various remarks from the peanut gallery. Knowing full well that I tried and it didn’t work falls on deaf ears.

If this happened once or twice or even a small handful of times, that would be bearable, slightly. But in the past year, it has been the norm.

The computer I have proclaimed is female, and she has the temper of a witch.

Yes, I know I have no concrete evidence, yet I know she is, she knows it, and it is clear as day she does not like me on certain occasions. And will only work when a male is at her keyboard.

A blog about the topics of writing, Sharon C. Williams

When did you begin to feel you were an author?

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I have had this discussion with members of my writing group. Some were more advanced with the mindset of if one writes, then one is a writer.

For me, it was when my first book was published. When I received my first royalty check, it just reinforced what I had told myself.

For many people in our circle, either of those reasons is the bar they set whether that person is family or friend. When one hears that repeatedly it is hard to break that mantra they have for you.

It takes a lot of work to write a book of any size. The easiest part is writing the darn thing. The work you put into a novel is minimal compared to the colossal amount of work left to do on the manuscript.

One still needs to do a vicious cycle of editing, revising, editing again, revising again, publishing and marketing your book.

Considering all that it takes if you write, you are an author. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Only when those people write books of their own will they truly understand and get where the rest of us are coming from to doing this. Maybe if they wrote a book they would not be so dismissive of others.