by Joni M Fisher | Mar 22, 2025 | Writing Life
Mark Zuckerberg’s META AI has copied novels from authors without permission or compensation. The Atlantic’s recent post about pirating grabbed my attention, so I entered my name into the search engine to see if any of my works were sucked into the AI...
by Joni M Fisher | Mar 21, 2025 | Writing Life
I’ve experienced surprises at book signings. At my very first book signing at the library in Winter Haven, Florida, a homeless man approached to say he liked mysteries and crime stories. We discussed favorite authors. He said he liked crime stories but not gory...
by Joni M Fisher | Mar 20, 2025 | Writing Life
Since moving to Florida as a Yankee, I’ve learned most things about native pests the hard way. Mutant-size Roaches While unpacking that first week, I learned the two-part horror of what the gentry euphemistically calls a Palmetto bug. The first horror is that it looks...
by Joni M Fisher | Feb 19, 2025 | Writing Life
The Tango Thirty-One Aero Clube and the Lakeland Aero Club share strategies and friendships. Shown at the Lakeland Aero Club hangar during Sun ‘n Fun are Amy Mattingly (Marketing Director of Tango 31), Dr. Marli White (Director of Tango 31), Tango 31 Director Kevin...
by Joni M Fisher | Jan 31, 2025 | Writing Tips
It has always been true that avid readers become better writers than their non-reading peers. Readers unknowingly gain an innate understanding of storytelling, a flourishing vocabulary, and vast knowledge about topics beyond their personal experience. As a published...
by Joni M Fisher | Jan 20, 2025 | Writing Life
Once the urge strikes to compose a novel, I draft a rough outline and launch into research. For my third novel this meant learning about boats–specifically Trawlers. Part of the story takes place on a trawler, so I needed to understand how they operate,...
by Joni M Fisher | Jan 15, 2025 | Writing Tips
Dialogue without conflict is talking heads. There, I’ve got it out in the open. In commercial, or genre fiction, dialogue makes up half of the novel with narration as the other half. This is why learning to craft great dialogue matters. Inexperienced writers tend to...
by Joni M Fisher | Jan 13, 2025 | Writing Tips
People recognize terrible dialogue when they hear it in movies, or on television or read it in books. It comes off wooden, robotic, confusing, lecturing, boring, or in some way artificial sounding. Examples abound in B-grade movies, comic books, soap operas, and...
by Joni M Fisher | Jan 6, 2025 | Writing Tips
Remember the last time you read dialogue, and it didn’t sound genuine? Something was off, odd, or not quite believable. Perhaps the wording did not suit the character. For example, unless a man is a decorator, painter, or artist, he won’t point to a color and call it...
by Joni M Fisher | Jan 3, 2025 | Writing Life
Before becoming an author, I was a reader. Of course, I still read as often as humanly possible, but before publishing my first book, I’d stand in long lines to get authors’ autographs and thank them for writing. In Hawaii, I shared a cab with screenwriter...