Member Blog

It’s free to join SPR and blog about your writing experiences. Read the latest blog entries from our community

Review: Legacy of the Light by Todd A. Gipstein

In an attempt to redeem his family’s honor, a man returns to keep the lighthouse where his father had failed to do his duty.

Keepers of the lonely lighthouse on Race Rock, off the shore of New London, Conn., had to learn to deal with intense isolation. The wife of Nathaniel Bowen, a keeper in the early 1900s, could not, so she left Nathaniel, taking their young son, Caleb, with her. Nathaniel was devastated, but continued to do his duty, until one night, consumed by grief over his absent family, he drank too much whiskey and failed to light the […]

2019-01-23T12:40:39+02:00October 8th, 2011|Categories: Member Blog|

Review: The Jaguar Dances by Barbara Winther

In Winther’s thriller, a vacation goes perilously awry when two friends encounter danger, intrigue and drug smugglers in the exotic resorts and mountain villages of Peru.

Along with her best friend Carrie, legal secretary Jan Fielding arrives in Peru hoping for a relaxing, glamorous vacation away from the office. But almost immediately it’s anything but peaceful. Gun-toting soldiers patrol the streets, Carrie’s suitcase is broken into while the girls are in the hotel bar and there’s something odd about their tour guide, Luis, the son of a business associate of Carrie’s father. Worse, Jan feels an attraction toward him that […]

2019-01-23T12:40:50+02:00October 8th, 2011|Categories: Member Blog|

Ebook Away!

I finally published an ebook version of my first novel, “Between Boyfriends.” I finished this book 5 years ago and eagerly began sending it out to literary agents. I got a ton of responses, some form letters and a few criticisms. The personal feedback was very positive but suggested necessary changes. I spent maybe 1 year doing an major rewrite, then eagerly send the new version back out again. Nothing. After about 1 year of sitting on the book and trying to come up with some brilliant way to convince an agent or publisher to do the last thing they […]

2019-01-22T05:57:52+02:00October 5th, 2011|Categories: Member Blog|

Site Update: Everything Works

Apologies for the lack of posting recently. For the last month or so, I’ve been chasing spam on the site, which has dampened some of my enthusiasm for creating new content – every time I came here I had to spend time deleting a bunch of accounts. It’s manual spam – people create an account and then manually add content. There’s no captcha to deal with this, as a real person is adding the spam. I am now more sick of Ugg boots than I’ve ever been.

I tried 5 different plugins and none of them worked. Lo and behold, […]

2011-10-02T11:43:32+02:00October 2nd, 2011|Categories: Member Blog|

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics for Authors

Whether you’re self-publishing or you went the traditional route, you’ve likely been told that you need to have a blog and a website. But, if you’re like a lot of authors, independent and otherwise, you don’t get many visitors to your site.

Leaning a little about search engine optimization or SEO can help.

SE-what, you ask? Some strange computer virus?

No, nothing so scary. Let’s take a look at the basics.

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the art of making your site/blog seem particularly useful and important to Google, so it’ll list your pages higher than those of […]

2011-10-02T10:03:47+02:00October 2nd, 2011|Categories: Member Blog, Resources|Tags: , |

What Happened to Suzy Wins Book Award

Readers Favorite Book Contest Award Winner

This is a fictional book based on actual facts; the names and locations are changed. This is a story of child abuse and how Suzy learned to forgive.

Suzy (Carol Denise Brown) was the 6th child out of 16 children. Her father seldom lived at the home. From the day she was born her mother seemed to hate her more than any of the other children. Their older brother was in charge of the kids when their mother was at work. He was very abusive at times, more so than their mother. Suzy was abused, not only by her family, […]

2011-10-08T13:55:10+02:00September 3rd, 2011|Categories: Member Blog|

Chris Turner: Author Interview

Wolf's-head, Rogues of Bindar Book I

Hi, I’m the author of “Wolf’shead”, Book 1 of the  Rogues of Bindar trilogy.

Welcome to Bindar: a world of scoundrels, opportunists and glib talkers.

A conniving fisherman/adventurer discovers a new meaning for the words mischief and scandal when he falls on the wrong side of a macabre magician, propelling him and his jokester poet friend into outlandish adventures. All illusions of a just and fair world are shattered!

First it is prison, then it is the precarious life of outlaws. To meet a dazzling shapeshifter, shrunken and imprisoned in the magician’s bottle of brine, and then liberate her is […]

2011-09-01T12:55:22+02:00September 1st, 2011|Categories: Interviews, Member Blog|

Beating them off with a Schtick

I’ve written a book with a schtick.

If I tell you that when I first drafted my collection of Christmas-themed horror shorts they were as a gift for my wife, who loves the holidays like no doe-eyed child ever did, and that I genuinely wanted to explore the notion of ‘giving’ creatively, while reveling in a mythology that is all too rarely untouched by serious genre writers, precisely because the associated tinsel-trimmed gimmickry makes them seem corny or hackneyed: you still won’t care. If I tell you these things they will only ring as excuses: as the book enters the […]

2011-09-01T12:27:24+02:00September 1st, 2011|Categories: Features, Member Blog|Tags: |
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