I have covered figuring out your Concept and Premise of your novel (scroll down and find it on my blog). That is step one.

I take it for granted you know your genre.

Your first scene in your first chapter should set up the precipating event.

in my novel Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Cleveland,

Alan Burke dialed the phone while simultaneously trying to light his cigarette. It didn’t go well. The phone slipped out of his hand as he flailed around and tried to cat...

Many new writers have an incorrect idea of what an edit consists of and what edits they need. Not only how many edits but what does each edit accomplish. You as an author soon realize where your strengths and weakness lie.

When I started out I thought editing consisted of all three types of edits rolled into one. In plain speak I thought Developmental editing...Line Editing, and Copy editing went together like a good bourbon and an excellent cigar. All three edits for a low p...

Hello folks...just want you to know I will have another Gunny Mac novel coming out this year...here is a bit of teaser....

Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Tomahawk Gap.

Gunny Mac and the detectives you have grown to love are back once again to stop the killing of Henry Running Bear, a Navajo Code talker who served with the boys on Guadacanal.

Someone wants the code Henry has and is willing to do anything to sell it to the Japanese. No one hurts a Marine who served with...

My private detective series, Gunny Mac Private Detective features four unique characters and three side characters that could almost carry a story by themselves. Unique in the sense, each bring characteristics that convey strength, weakness, humor, and a hardness which allows them to fight and possibly die for their honor.

I didn't mean to take away from my protagonist Gunny Mac, but his personality made men of character want to be around him. I didn't plan on it being...

I realize google doesn't want to promote articles unless they are a thousands words or more but I'm not going to do that. I cut the fluff and I get to the point.

Your time is valuable, so is mine.

I have been writing novels for five plus years. I have listened to hundreds of gurus on podcasts, websites, and read many of their blogs and books. They are interested in selling and upselling their products. They give you a pin prick of real information and try to sell you a produc...

Ohio weather is far behind, and I hope my friends are comfortable and warm.

While I have been away enjoying the simple pleasures of South Carolina and the temperatures in the high 70s and 80s, my writing has continued. In fact, my word production has increased. I decided Hemmingway was not any more disciplined than me. He lived among chickens, cats, gin, and heat in Key West, Florida, and never missed a beat. Gee that must have been fun. I may need to run out and get a...

Just a note... I wanted to say a few words about people who claim to dislike literary agents, as if there is a plot to keep us authors from being discovered. If that is the case, as an infantry officer who has gone through many training schools to avoid capture in various climes, they are really good! Especially how they get away from me, LOL! Here are a few of my thoughts.

Every job has its fun parts, and every job can make you feel overwhelmed by the sheer force of the job. ...

Sir:

Good morning. I wrote a blog post, "Why is it so hard to form a publishing team." (Visit my author website at gunnymac.com to read.) I have been a businessman, a Marine Corps officer, and a high school teacher. Now I write novels. I only do business with people who see me as a partner, not a client, as a friend, not a means to an end. Over the years, I have worked with editors who demand outrageous sums of money and deliver really bad results. Website designers who ...

 A Guide to Constructing Scenes and Sequels in Fiction Writing 

 When it comes to writing scenes and sequels, most fiction novelists have their own individual approaches. However, there are some common elements that can help a new writer create vivid, effective scenes and sequels in their stories. In this blog post, we’ll explore the essential elements of scene and sequel construction so you can start incorporating them into your work. 

Scenes vs Seq...

1. Use Quote Marks and a comma.

Before your dialogue starts puts a quotation mark at the front and the back.

Example:

"I'm  not going through with it," she said.

A comma is used because you have a dialogue tag (she said) to identify the speaker.

"I hate you," shouted Betty. 

2: When you have another speaker answering the one before it; create a new paragraph indicating a new speaker.

As you can see with this dialogue it is confusing... donot do this.

“I don't ...

Many people ask the question...where do you get your ideas from? Well, I will confess to you 99% of the time I  find them. You have heard me say over and over again-write about what you have knowledge of and what you are passionate about. I love history...I know alot about history and all my stories are based on a true event that happened...then I fictionalize the story. The world we live in has so much information available to us. Somewhere I read that the worlds knowle...

Look... I write like the old black and white movies about heroic newspapermen of the 1940s and 1950s. You know when the story was everything and so was the truth. Men who went after the scoop because it was their job to bring out real facts to the American public. 

I'm not saying I'm heroic, only that I'm usually behind the times because I don't like the times we are living in. 

And I am not a techno guy. I barely can type on my computer and if I run into problems i...

We are spending January, February, and March at Seabrook Island and Beaufort, South Carolina. The weather has been beautiful, and I've been writing, writing, and writing onward to my goal of completing my third novel, Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Tomahawk Gap.

The best part is I've gotten to love my characters, and I know them so well they basically write the novel for me, like giving free rein to a horse. They react to my story and events, and I go along for the rid...

So true...I remember in high school I read Napoleon Hill's masterpiece, "Think and Grow Rich." In his book he says, 'what the mind can conceive and believe in, it can achieve'. Writing a novel is no different. Think about it for a second! I told a young man a while back, who was having confidence issues, you are not alone buddy, most of us average men and women have the same issues. We as writers must not make writing a novel bigger than ourselves. There are millions of libra...

  I'm proud to be a new member of the Military Writers Society of America.

As an Ambassador I will travel to different locations and help veterans tell their stories. Hopefully I can guide them from writer to published author.

If you know a veteran that wants to share their stories and help save treasured memories and experiences please have them contact me or give me their contact information and I will contact them.

My email address is: gunnymac26@gmail.com

I'm writing this article surrounded by my two Border Collies... Miss Molly and Beauregard Pierre Townsend Walker, a 75-pound tri-colored Border Collie. They are much smarter than me, and I often ask them for help. They just look at me as if to say, "Hey, we helped you write the last two novels, but we can't do everything."

And by the way, Beau said I didn't fully fulfill my cookie contract and he wasn't going to work anymore until I paid him 1,422 good boy cookies. (Ho...

A new writer... if you want to make money; is undertaking  a serious venture into the unknown. 

I mean where is the book that is published covering every aspect of creating a business writing novels?

If you found one it would be at least few thousand pages long, weigh many pounds and cost hundreds of dollars...and the person trying to comprehend it would fall fast asleep or throw the book away and never write a single word. Such is the amount of knowledge a person n...

Seadog Publishing Presents...Steven Osarczuk

Today we have the honor of interviewing Steven Osarczuk our narractor that does all of Seadog Publishing narration of our novels. 

You may listen to the the interview or read it.

1.        Please tell us about yourself?

Well, I've been an audiobook narrator and voice over artist for a few years now. Prior to that I was self employed as a custom woodworker/ carpenter and ran my own woodshop for about...

Marketing is an area that takes much time to master, and money. Not only do you have to write an entertaining book, but it must be edited correctly, the cover must be just right, and the writer must be one tough cookie. A writer friend once told me that you don't start making your money back until you have at least five of six books published in multiple formats. It's expensive and time consuming. The knowledge base you must have is enormous. Building out your Amazon page, bl...

The picture you see is the cover of my second novel...you can tell just from the cover who these characters are and the story behind them!

We will begin the thought process of writing a novel like a builder builds a house...ground level. I don't want to confuse the beginner novelist so I just want throw out some ideas you may want to consider in your writing. They are important in deciding how you are going to write your novel and the emphasis in the areas you think ar...

I often scan facebook writing groups and I see new writers talk about writers block...how they can't seem to figure out the next scene or event that will take place. 

In my humble opinion there are reasons for that.

A. You lack knowledge of what you are writing about. You have a great idea, but you are writing in a vacuum; you have an idea...but no connection to a stream of consciousness. 

B. Your background is limited. You have not run into situations that produce ...

I have spent five years trying to learn how to write a novel...I read twenty books on fiction technique, I attended numerous writers conferences, I listened to 100 blogcasts, reviewed at least three hundred writing websites, and have reviewed over thirty writing facebook groups. What have I learned?

I learned how to write by writng over one million words in the process of writing my first novel.

I have over four hundred undergraduate hours and over 140 graduate hours.

Guess w...

Two years ago, an event changed my life. I spent fifty dollars to attend a writers' conference in Columbus, Ohio. I walked in just before the writing guru started. The seating capacity was for fifty or sixty people and there was one seat left with a table of eight women. I was mortified...the whole room consisted of women except for me, and Larry Brooks the speaker. I was waiting for Larry to take off his shirt and show his muscled pecks because I thought I mistakenly joined ...

Interview for Red Headed Book Lover                              

By Aimee Cook, originally published on redheadedbooklover.com

1. Thank you for joining us at Red Headed Book Lover! Please tell us more about yourself.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in a Slovak family. My mother never finished the eighth grade to help support her family and my dad did not finish high school because he enlisted in ...

Move on over Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett there is a new hard-boiled detective novelist on the scene presenting his latest book, Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Chinatown!

I started writing about private eyes, shamus, gumshoes, private dicks, sleuths, bird-dog, and snoopers, because I fell in love with black and white movies of the 1940s and 1950s.Who doesn't love Casablanca with Humprey Bogart as Sam Spade the quintessential movie in this genre. And who could...

As an Architect and Builder of a story, the very first step is figuring out your CONCEPT and PREMISE.

Your novel begins right here.
Concept and Premise
You must understand these two concepts.
If you do your novel will be much easier to write.

CONCEPT

IS BUILT AROUND A UNIQUE
WHAT-IF-QUESTION
THAT CAN BE PITCHED IN
ONE TO THREE
SENTENCES
 

CONCEPT:   
WHAT IF A MAN CAME DOWN FROM THE HEAVENS 
 

PREMISE

AND PROMISED ETERNAL LIFE?

• A protagonist whose li...

I will use the beginning scene in my third novel Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Tomahawk Gap as an example.

We shall use some scenes from my novel Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Chinatown to illustrate what a scene should do in Lesson 6

PS. This is not a scene!

What is the purpose of a scene? It has only one main job…to drive the story forward!!! If it doesn’t move the story along what is its purpose?

Forget it kid…forget the scene…...

As I stated in one of my earlier lessons I had a framework that I wanted to write around but I had no story. Here are those individual items I wanted to write about.

I wanted to write about events in the 1940s and 1950s because I love that time period.

I have a certain genre I love.

I always have a main character that I love.

I always have a sense of the story I love

I love dogs…so they are in my novels.

I’m Catholic, and some of my heroes are priests and charact...

So Much Information Out There!

I had a degree…I had my Masters of Science…I thought I should know how to write a novel. I certainly had read enough of them. I started to look over my favorite fiction novels and I went through them with different colored pens. Blue for narration, yellow for dialogue, green for different tags ie. he said, she said, etc., etc. I circled adverbs because they were supposed to be the evil of writing. I used purple for any information ...

Below this picture is the last two scenes in Chapter 1 of my novel: Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Chinatown. I will explain to you what each scene represents and why.

My first Chapter was designed to do a few things.

• Introduce Gunny Mac and Gunny Wojo
• I needed to show the reader who Gunny Mac was and why he had to leave the Marine Corps after getting terribly wounded on Guadalcanal in 1942.
• The audience now knows that Gunny Mac wins the Navy Cross and is an a...

In this lesson, we will cover the important concept of writing about what you love.  Once you grasp these two simple concepts, you can begin to look deeper into your novel. It makes no difference to me if you are a pantser (a person who sits down and starts writing) or a plotter (where you outline your novel) when you begin to write.

People have different comfort levels when it comes to writing a novel, and that’s okay. You should have some basic concepts of what a...

You are committed to writing a novel! That is outstanding.

Now you must be committed to spending money.

I’m not trying to sell you or up-sell you… just trying to help writers. I get nothing from anybody who is somebody.

I have published posts on at least thirty Facebook writing groups and have read thousands of posts by aspiring writers.

Through it all, I’m left with some qualms about my fellow writers, mostly the new writers who were like me. That is not g...

Gunny Mac Private Detective Trouble in Chinatown by Steven Walker

by Tim O’Mara, originally published on thebigthrill.org

It’s the onset of World War II. President Roosevelt is collecting and burning the currency in Hawaii in case the Japanese invade. Corrupt military officers, gangsters, and police officials are poised to steal as much of that money as they can. A badly wounded Marine Gunnery Sergeant and three other wounded veterans team up to stop them.

Got it?...