I’ve been reading a great deal of Indy books lately. Being an Indy author myself, I feel like I should help support others like me. I’ve read some very good work. I’ve also read some work that needs some help. Since I’m a teacher and taught English for some 15 of my 21 teaching years, I thought I would write a series of posts about some fundamentals of writing.

Now I’m not talking about typos. We see those all the time and it sucks when they pop up, but they do. I know the difference between there, they’re, and their, but sometimes in the heat of plotting out a story, I type the wrong one. Sometimes I write the same word twice, especially if I’ve stopped and then started writing later. Sometimes I simply misspell a word. The answer of course is proofreading. By the time I publish a book I’ve proofread it myself at least a dozen times. I also have at least one proofreader besides myself read through it for errors. Even so, some creep in. I try to read through my already published books at least once a year. Sometimes I find a typo that has persisted for a dozen passes. I also have a handful of loyal readers who let me know when they catch an error. I feel embarrassed, but grateful. And don’t even get me started about typos created during the editing process.  Sometimes I want to pull out my hair.  It’s not even that unusual to find a typo in a professionally edited, big publisher edition of a well-known author’s book. I see it all the time. So I’m not writing about those.

What I am going to write about is some general fundamental basics of writing. Upcoming posts will be about tense, point of view, figures of speech, characters, pacing, and whatever else I can think up. These posts will all be titled Writing Fundamentals, so watch for them in the coming days.