The SLUSHPILE Blog

The delay in getting another block of ISBN’s (bar codes) was enough to have me looking hard at our upcoming schedule. . . and to delay our upcoming releases a little longer.
Much of the delay has to do with the author of our next release (Gail MacMillan — Caledonian Privateer). Our experience with her work [...]

The government tells us there are too many of us.
The government tells us there is not enough food to feed everyone.
The government tells us we are leaving too large of a ‘carbon footprint’ and we are bad for the planet.
The government tells us we are too wasteful of natural resources.
Then the government says, “But we’ll [...]

Yesterday I blogged about Joel Rosenberg’s Dead Heat and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series. Although both of these series are pointedly religious, I designated them into the more general category of disaster books.
Both of these series deal with the End Times as related in Bible Prophecy and the disasters that occur during [...]

As some of you may recall, I have been reading Joel Rosenberg’s Dead Heat. This is the fifth (I think) book in an end times scenario series of books. It has many similarities to the popular and groundbreaking Left Behind series, but where as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins tackled the return of Christ from [...]

Running a semi-large web-site (bigger than a blog, smaller than Ebay) I, of course, am always interested in things pertaining to the web.
Last night while surfing around on the television, I came across a documentary about Ebay. Did you know that Ebay is only ten years old? Isn’t that amazing. Somehow, it seems as though [...]

It is getting harder and harder to focus on business. It doesn’t help that I’m still waiting for some grease to lubricate the machinery, but the main distraction is our upcoming trip to Michigan to visit Jim Spurr, Friends Good Will and a few other sites.
You may think it odd that we’re planning a trip [...]

Anyone who has ever had the frustrating experience of waiting for a check in the mail can probably sympathize with me. I’m currently waiting on FOUR of them. Without grease for the wheels, the machinery is at low idle.
Normally I would ‘advance’ our business some personal funds, but with a trip to Michigan to visit author James [...]

This morning I spent some time doing some much needed housekeeping on the blog.
Neal’s Irksome Corner had not been updated since February (gasp). That is no indication that he suddenly became less irksome, quite the opposite in fact. No, the fault lies with his personal assistant (that would be me) being irksomely slow. But I’ve [...]

Secondary Characters are characters that are going to reoccur throughout different scenes in your story, but whom the story is not focused upon. They require a lot less description than main characters, but you still wish to give each their own unique features and mannerisms. This aids greatly in helping your reader to keep the [...]

The amount of description each character receives is going to be based on how large of a role they play. This is not to say that lesser characters get short-shrifted: you as the writer need to sum them up succinctly and memorably.
But we’ll focus on main characters first. In the beginning of this Descriptions Series, [...]