Blog Archives: May 2018

I read a book review today from a site that reviews books for self-published authors for a fee, the lowest of which is $97. For this fee, the author got a one star (out of four) review for his book. Why? Because the book, although it may have a decent story, was riddled with typos, word usage, grammatical, and punctuation errors. This author is what’s wrong with self-publishing, and why it has a well-deserved bad reputation.* Why would anyone publish such a book? Maybe out of ignorance, or out of arrogance, or maybe out of lack of funds to ...

  I’ve been working on my chess game lately, and realized that playing chess bears a lot of similarities to writing a novel. Structure. Chess is very structured. Like a story, it is divided into three acts. There is a beginning (opening), middle game, and endgame. Strict rules govern movement of the pieces. Although are no rules as to how long a game can go (outside of the fifty move rule), it is rare to see a game of more than fifty moves, and most games last around thirty moves. Planning. In both playing chess and story writing, it’s ...