Here at last is a book by two professional editors to teach writers the techniques of the editing trade that turn promising manuscripts into published novels and short stories.In this completely revised and updated second edition, Renni Browne and Dave King teach you, the writer, how to apply the editing techniques they have developed to your own work. Chapters on dialogue, exposition, point of view, interior monologue, and other techniques take you through the same processes an expert editor would go through to perfect your manuscript. Each point is illustrated with examples, many drawn from the hundreds of books Browne and King have edited.

    Packed with 30 exercises, abundant examples, and practical strategies, this guidebook will help you write unforgettable characters who "come alive" on the page, create compelling dialogue, and chart more breathtaking emotional journeys for your characters. Stant Litore is the author of The Ansible Stories, The Zombie Bible, The Running of the Tyrannosaurs, and Dante's Heart. Best known for his weird fiction, alternate history, and scifi, he has taught frequent courses for writers across the genres and has served as a developmental editor for Westmarch Publishing. His own fiction has been acclaimed by NPR, has served as the subject of scholarly work in Relegere and Weird Fiction Review, and he has been hailed as "SF's premier poet of loneliness." He lives in Colorado with his wife and two daughters, and is working on his next book.

    Kids take a vacation from books and those with limited access to books lose ground to their peers. You may have thought there's nothing you can do about it, but there is. No More Summer-Reading Loss shows how to ensure that readers continue to grow year round.School-based practitioners Carrie Cahill and Kathy Horvath join with renowned researchers Anne McGill-Franzen and Dick Allington to help you make summer readers out of every student. You'll stop summer-reading loss as they help you:identify practices that inadvertently contribute to it understand the research on its implications and its prevention take research-based action with 8 instructional strategies. Building independence. Keeping kids on grade-level. Closing the achievement gap. These are just a few of the valuable outcomes that No More Summer-Reading Loss can support. Most importantly, it will help you pass on a love of reading that knows no season and gives readers confidence when they return in the fall. About the Not This, But That Series No More Summer-Reading Loss is part of the Not This, But That series, edited by Nell K. Duke and Ellin Oliver Keene. It helps teachers examine common, ineffective classroom practices and replace them with practices supported by research and professional wisdom. In each book a practicing educator and an education researcher identify an ineffective practice; summarize what the research suggests about why; and detail research-based, proven practices to replace it and improve student learning. Read a sample chapter from No More Summer-Reading Loss.

    With chapters on creating gods, species/races, plants, animals, monsters, heroes, villains, and even undead, it draws on the author’s quarter century of world building experience. Pointed questions, and an examination of answers and their repercussions, will help readers decide on goals, how to reach them, and whether they are even worth pursuing. Always practical, Creating Life will quickly improve the skills of beginners and experts alike, making a time consuming project more fun, easier, faster, and skillfully done.Unlike other world building guides, the series discusses how to use your inventions in stories while balancing narrative flow with the need for explaining your world. Tailored examples illustrate this. Extensive, culled research on life forms is provided to classify and understand options without overwhelming world builders with extraneous details.Storytellers, game designers, gamers, and hobbyists will benefit from seven free templates that can be downloaded and reused. CREATING LIFE will help your setting stand out from the multitude of fantasy and science fiction worlds audiences see. THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING is the only multi-volume series of its kind and is three times the length, depth, and breadth of other guides.Endorsement from Bestselling Author Piers Anthony:"I read Creating Life (The Art of World Building, #1), by Randy Ellefson...It is exhaustive, well written, and knowledgeable...I, as a successful science fiction and fantasy writer, have generated many worlds, so this material is familiar, but it would have been easier and probably better had I had a reference like this. It is realistic, recognizing that the average writer may not have the patience to work out all the details before getting into the action..."

    From enthusiasts to those who have just been introduced to the beautiful world of photography, knowing the craft and equipment is essential. This little comprehensive guide for beginners will take you on an amazing journey of discovering how wonderful Digital Photography is and how mesmerizing the art can be. From the advantages of SLR and the importance of shutter speed, to the types of lenses and the significance of good lighting, you will soon be on your journey to capturing the most stunning pictures and a kaleidoscope of dazzling sights to be eternalized. Technology is ever changing and now with Digital Photography, the world can be seen in vivid colors through your art. Begin your journey right here, right now.

    It was written for both graduate and undergraduate students who already know the basics of academic writing but may still struggle to express their ideas using the right words. The Only Academic Phrasebook You’ll Ever Need contains 600 sentence templates organized around the typical sections of an academic paper. Here are some examples: 1. Establishing a research territory: The last few years have seen an increased interest in ____. 2. Describing research gaps: To date, no study has looked specifically at ____. 3. Stating your aims: The aim of this study is to discuss the extent to which ____. 4. Describing the scope and organization of your paper: In chapter ____ , the concept of ____ is further explored. 5. General literature review: A number of scholars have attempted to identify ____. 6. Referencing: In his 1799 study, Smith argued that ____. 7. Sampling and data collection: Participants were randomly selected based on ____. 8. Data analysis and discussion: The data provide preliminary evidence that ____. The Only Academic Phrasebook You’ll Ever Need also contains 80 grammar and vocabulary tips for both native and non-native speakers. For example: 1. What's the difference between "effect" and "affect"? “Imply” and “infer”? "They're", "their" and "there"? 2. Is "irregardless" correct? 3. Do you say "the criteria was" or "the criteria were"? The Only Academic Phrasebook You’ll Ever Need is NOT a comprehensive academic writing textbook. It will NOT teach you key academic skills such as choosing the right research question, writing clear paragraphs, dealing with counter arguments and so on. But it will help you find the best way to say what you want to say so you can ace that paper!

    . . It’s Complicated will update your mind.”—Alissa Quart, New York Times Book Review  “A fascinating, well-researched and (mostly) reassuring look at how today's tech-savvy teenagers are using social media.”—People  “The briefest possible summary? The kids are all right, but society isn’t.”—Andrew Leonard, Salon   What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens’ lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers’ ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity. Boyd’s conclusions are essential reading not only for parents, teachers, and others who work with teens but also for anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in years to come. Offering insights gleaned from more than a decade of original fieldwork interviewing teenagers across the United States, boyd concludes reassuringly that the kids are all right. At the same time, she acknowledges that coming to terms with life in a networked era is not easy or obvious. In a technologically mediated world, life is bound to be complicated.

    Poverty thrust them forward instead of keeping them back. Therefore, if you are poor make your circumstances a means to an end. Have ambition, keep a goal in sight and bend every energy to reach that goal. A story is told of Thomas Carlyle the day he attained the highest honor the literary world could confer upon him when he was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University. After his installation speech, in going through the halls, he met a student seemingly deep in study.

    With their flagrant criminal violation of society's rules, serial killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy are among the most dramatic examples of the psychopath. Individuals with this personality disorder are fully aware of the consequences of their actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet they are terrifyingly self-centered, remorseless, and unable to care about the feelings of others. Perhaps most frightening, they often seem completely normal to unsuspecting targets--and they do not always ply their trade by killing. Presenting a compelling portrait of these dangerous men and women based on 25 years of distinguished scientific research, Dr. Robert D. Hare vividly describes a world of con artists, hustlers, rapists, and other predators who charm, lie, and manipulate their way through life. Are psychopaths mad, or simply bad? How can they be recognized? And how can we protect ourselves? This book provides solid information and surprising insights for anyone seeking to understand this devastating condition.

    The reader's experience must be an emotional journey of its own, one as involving as your characters' struggles, discoveries, and triumphs are for you.That's where The Emotional Craft of Fiction comes in. Veteran literary agent and expert fiction instructor Donald Maass shows you how to use story to provoke a visceral and emotional experience in readers. Topics covered include: emotional modes of writing beyond showing versus telling your story's emotional world moral stakes connecting the inner and outer journeys plot as emotional opportunities invoking higher emotions, symbols, and emotional language cascading change story as emotional mirror positive spirit and magnanimous writing the hidden current that makes stories move Readers can simply read a novel...or they can experience it. The Emotional Craft of Fiction shows you how to make that happen.

    It encourages a greater sensitivity to your world, inside and out. It serves as a haven for new ideas until they are strong and mature enough to face the harsh light of rational judgment. It gives you a quiet place to catch your breath and begin writing. Breathing In, Breathing Out is a book for the writer in each one of us, however lost, however buried. Ralph Fletcher takes a probing look into the nature of a writer's notebook, examining what it is, how writers use it, and what makes it tick. You will discover why writers like Naomi Shihab Nye and Dorothy Allison consider their notebooks so important to the work they create. You will also read snippets from Fletcher's notebook, where he reveals the "displayed self" of a writer whose innermost workings he knows best.To Fletcher, keeping a writer's notebook is as natural an activity as breathing so he has organized his book in a way that illuminates two basic aspects of the process. Breathing In refers to the way the notebook can serve as a receptacle for selected insights, lines, images, dreams, and fragments of conversations. In this way it helps you pay closer attention to your world. Breathing Out is intended to suggest the notebook as an ideal place to use what you have collected and spark your own original writing.This book is for new writers as well as those who may have once loved to write but have lost the spark along the way. It will help you find a natural rhythm for using a notebook and in the process start living the life of a writer.

    In the last fifty years, we've zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to tablet computers, text messages to tweets. We generate more and more words with each passing day. Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel.In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing: their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints.Using innovative analytic techniques, Pennebaker X-rays everything from Craigslist advertisements to the Federalist Papers-or your own writing, in quizzes you can take yourself-to yield unexpected insights. Who would have predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that a world leader's use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he led his country into war? You'll learn why it's bad when politicians use "we" instead of "I," what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge's syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion. Barack Obama, Sylvia Plath, and King Lear are among the figures who make cameo appearances in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying-whether we mean them to or not.

    You’ve accumulated hardwon knowledge and mastered the solution to a difficult problem. Now you want to put it out into the world— and be recognized for your expertise, like those you’ve watched reap the benefits of a published book. You know you have to write it. You’ve heard it from people for years: you should really write a book. They’re right. It’s time for you to write the book that cements your legacy and impacts other people—and maybe even the world. So why haven’t you done it yet? The truth is, writing a book is scary. Is your idea good enough? How do you structure it, write it, and stay motivated? What if you actually finish it, and it’s bad? Worst of all: what if you publish it, and no one cares? If this sounds familiar, The Scribe Method will help you navigate these fears on your journey to becoming a published author. Guided by experts Tucker Max and Zach Obront, you’ll overcome the obstacles that have held you back with a simple, time-saving, effective method to writing a great book, and learn the step-by-step process that has created hundreds of bestselling titles.

    It features comprehensive coverage of such key areas as cognition, sensation and perception, emotion and motivation, learning and skills, language, mental disorder, and research methods. Entries provide clear and concise definitions, word origins and derivations, and they are extensively cross-referenced for ease of use. In addition, over 80 illustrations complement the text. Detailed appendices follow the AZ dictionary and include a list of 800 commonly used abbreviations and symbols, and a list of phobias and phobic stimuli with full definitions. Now containing an appendix of recommended web links, which are accessed and kept current via the Dictionary of Psychology website, this edition offers more information than any other dictionary of its kind, making it an ideal reference for students, teachers, and professionals, and for anyone with an interest in the workings of the mind.

    It's about falling in love with books again and discovering the habits to help you read more. Author Kevin D. Hendricks read 137 books in 2012 without giving up TV, a day job or becoming completely antisocial. He shares what worked for him, including carrying a book everywhere (including church), reclaiming idle moments (software loading), and not being ashamed of genre (he's partial to post-apocalyptic sci-fi). It's a quick read so you can absorb the ideas, figure out what might work for you and fall in love with reading again.