From an early age I was always more interested when things went wrong in the world. The light, fluffy Disney world of my younger childhood was left behind as I passed into my teenage years and surrounded myself with works of dystopian fiction such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

This love of a futuristic world gone wrong spilled over into my movie taste as well. So, here is a list of my favourite dystopian movies of all time, appearing in no particular order. What are your favourites?

Dystopian movies list:

1. 12 monkeys – a delightfully creepy and mysterious film with excellent acting and a gripping storyline. The music has an unhinged, fairground ride kind of feel to it as well.
2. A Clockwork Orange – probably my personal favourite dystopian…

I do!

And without Tweetdeck I would’ve been lost over the holidays.

At times I had 5 grandchildren sleeping over, and a house overflowing with fun and holiday cheer. So there was little time to Tweet out in a timely manner to my peeps out in Tweetdom. But I hated the thought of leaving them out in the cold for two entire weeks.

Thank you TweetDeck!

And Thank youHashtags!

Learning to Twitter – Part 1

Posted by Solveig Werner

This post is filled with great tips on using TweetDeck and a terrific list of hashtags. 

Some of my favorites are #amwriting, #writing, #blogging, and #blogger. Do you have a favorite hashtag you use?

One new thing I’ve started doing is setting up tweets to go out, via TweetDeck, of older posts. Why? Because new people are joining Twitterevery day. 

Hey, I’m into recycling, aren’t we…

The chicken or the egg?

More purchases or more reader reviews?

And I’m not talking about purchasing reviews – those are BAD, forbidden, illegal, and just plain wrong.

No, I’m asking if you think reader reviews are so important that you give away copies to get reviews, hoping the reviews will be good. There is always a chance some readers won’t like your style.

Without reader reviews, no interest is generated.

A bit of a dilemma right?

So what is a writer to do?

Kari Stevenson wrote over atBookFuel.com just why Book Reviews Are Important

To read this article by Kimberley Grabas, click on the link or her photo below:

thinking-about-writing-in-multiple-genres-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

Author Al Macy

Friend of the blog Al Macy steps forward again to enlighten us as to some of his successes using KBoards and other forums to glean information he’s used to tweak his book covers or polish a blurb. Forums have been elusive to me, so I asked Al to shed some light on them for us. He graciously accepted. (So glad he doesn’t have his own blog!)

Here’s Al:

 .

Dan: What is a forum?

Al: A forum in an online discussion group or bulletin board. It’s kind of like a party for introverts. A party for people interested in a specific topic. It’s not live, like a chat room, so you can jump into a conversation at any time. You might wake up a three a.m. and think of an answer or comment you want to post.

I say “for introverts” because you can choose how much…