Hello there! As tax season looms and the economy gets worse, I just keep reminding myself that there are still lots of wonderful things just around the corner . . . like Easter and spring! The Bologna Children’s Book Fair is over, and I did make some good contacts from that, including an agent in Germany who asked for my book and renewed ties to an agent in Korea. I think my fingers are getting sore from crossing them for so long, but I still have faith that all the awards my first book, Paraworld Zero, has been receiving will help me to get a new publisher. I haven’t submitted my second book yet to anyone, but soon . . . very soon!

After all this time, I'm still getting great reviews for Paraworld Zero. This one just came in from ReaderViewsKids.com for the audiobook. "...a well-written, well-narrated piece of literature... Paraworld Zero is for readers who enjoy stories of strange worlds, stranger creatures and some of the strangest (but good) characters to be ever audioed."

Most published authors will tell you that the easy part is writing the first draft, but after that, the difficult and sometimes tedious part starts . . . editing! My second book, Magical Learning, ended up being about 400 pages, so I’ve got my work cut out for me. I initially used MS Word's grammar checker but found it to be less than desirable. It did find some errors, but it seemed to gloss over most of my manuscript. After doing some research online I discovered that WordPerfect’s grammar checker (i.e. Grammatik) is far better, so I got the latest version of WordPerfect and went to town. After tweaking the settings, I realized that WordPerfect can check for a lot of other things like cliches, passive verbs, long sentences, redundant words, etc. It took me over a week to go through the entire book, though, but it was worth it. My favorite feature was the “commonly misused words” checker. That helps prevent you from using a sentence like “she picked up her bowls” instead of “she picked up her bowels.”

Note that grammar checkers are far from perfect. In fact, I’d say the majority of the suggestions I got were useless or downright incorrect. Because of this, if you don’t have a firm background in punctuation and grammar, you could do more harm than good to your book if you accept all of the suggestions on blind faith.

I dread tax season more than any time of the year. Last year it took me a week to do our taxes. This year it only took me a day and a half. I found this funny plate on an old beat-up car in Alabama. I thought I’d share it with you all. How true it is.