Disclaimer first—I do not consider myself a professional anything, so my suggestions and tips should be taken as just one more person on the internet sharing his personal opinion, based on his own experiences.  These tips and ideas may work for you too, but they may not.  Just saying. Writing Tip #025   Okay, you’ve finished you first draft.   You’ve read through it once.   You’ve read through it twice.   You’ve fixed a countless number of mistakes both times you read through it.   You start in on your third pass through your work, and I’ll be damned, another misspelled word!   How is it that our eyes can read over the same misspelled word three to five times without even noticing it?   I’ve run across an easy hack which has helped me locate a lot of misspelled words in my latest work in progress, and it’s so simple.   If you’re using Microsoft Word to write your story, try using the “Read Aloud” tool in the Review tab. ...

               Sometimes, I just want to reach out to a reader and say, "Thank you for noticing the effort I put into that!"  In a reader’s review of my book, TheGouge , the reviewer picked up on something which I’m not afraid to say I’m pretty proud of:  “All of the characters acted logically and in line with their personalities, which I greatly appreciated. It’s always a pet peeve of mine when characters do dumb things just to move the plot forward, and I’m happy to say that this wasn’t an element of David’s story at all.”                   I’m confident I’m not the only author who tries to keep from creating characters who are illogical or out of the norm for the sake of being out of the norm, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about my character’s actions and whether or not what they do will be considered believable.   I get caught up i...