Toby Neal was raised on Kauai in Hawaii. She wrote and illustrated her first story at age 5. After initially majoring in journalism, she eventually settled on mental health as a career and loves her work, saying, “I’m endlessly fascinated with people’s stories.”
Toby credits her counseling background in adding depth to her characters–from the villains to Lei Texeira, the courageous and vulnerable heroine in the Lei Crime Series, to the wounds and psychological implications of the heroes of the Scorch Series.
Want to write a crime-fiction story but not sure where to start? Are you between drafts and feeling stuck? Do you feel that you just don’t know enough about police work to write a believable police detective protagonist?
In this conversational and fact-filled handbook, veteran police detective Adam Richardson answers the criminal investigation questions most frequently asked by authors and screenwriters. Unlike many other writing guides about “the cop stuff,” the Writer’s Detective Handbook addresses police procedure and criminal investigation from the storyteller’s perspective.
The Writer’s Detective Handbook: Criminal Investigation for Authors and Screenwriters equips storytellers with the ability to tell a great story while keeping the police-work aspects believable. Reading this book will empower you to write the crime-fiction story you’ve been dying to tell!
What if you no longer had to worry that social media marketing would take hours, leaving you with less time to focus on your writing?
Social Media in 30 Minutes a Day provides a formula that authors can follow to help them save time online without losing their effectiveness or impact.
In just eleven chapters, Frances Caballo helps writers:
implement the same four-step formula that she uses every day
understand the new formula for saving time online
learn how to become a more effective and efficient marketer
learn about hashtags, buzz words, and social media’s lexicon
discover apps that can help writers save time while using social media
use the best tips and best practices you need to know to successfully market your book and blog
If you’ve avoided social media because you felt that you didn’t have enough time for it, you’ve used it sporadically, or you’ve been frustrated by how much time social media networking takes, this book is for you.
Once you read this book, you’ll never waste time online again.
She’s written several social media books including The Author’s Guide to Goodreads, Social Media Just for Writers, and Social Media in 30 Minutes a Day. Her focus is on helping authors surmount the barriers that keep them from flourishing online, building their platform, finding new readers, and selling more books. Her clients include authors of every genre and writers’ conferences. Not sure how you’re doing online? Sign up for her free email course at www.SocialMediaJustforWriters.com
Geoff Symon is a 20-year Federal Forensic Investigator and Polygraph Examiner. His participation in high-profile cases includes the attacks on September 11, 2001, the War in Iraq, the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion, the 2002 bombings in Bali and the Chandra Levy investigation, among countless other cases.
He has direct, first-hand experience investigating cases including murder (of all types), suicide, arson, kidnapping, bombings, sexual assault, child exploitation, theft and financial crimes. He has specified and certified training in the collection and preservation of evidence, blood-spatter analysis, autopsies and laboratory techniques. You can reach him at GeoffSymon.com.
Want to add an autopsy that won’t kill your story? Death swings its scythe in every genre, from family funerals to crime scenes to creatures that won’t stay buried. This user-friendly, illustrated reference digs into all things posthumous and postmortem.
Presented as a research manual for the experienced writer, this “Forensics for Fiction” title offers practical approaches and realistic details by covering:
¤ Terms and techniques used during autopsy procedures
¤ Different postmortem professionals and their specialties
¤ The stages of decomposition in different environments
¤ Methods used to estimate the time of death
¤ Case studies in which autopsies cracked the crime
¤ Examples of how to use autopsies in any popular genre
Whether you’re writing about dissection or resurrection, this guidebook covers it all from cadaver to slab as an easy-to-understand resource for dead-on storytelling.
The award-winning author of The Music of the Primesexplores the future of creativity and how machine learning will disrupt, enrich, and transform our understanding of what it means to be human.
Can a well-programmed machine do anything a human can―only better? Complex algorithms are choosing our music, picking our partners, and driving our investments. They can navigate more data than a doctor or lawyer and act with greater precision. For many years we’ve taken solace in the notion that they can’t create. But now that algorithms can learn and adapt, does the future of creativity belong to machines, too?
It is hard to imagine a better guide to the bewildering world of artificial intelligence than Marcus du Sautoy, a celebrated Oxford mathematician whose work on symmetry in the ninth dimension has taken him to the vertiginous edge of mathematical understanding. In The Creativity Code he considers what machine learning means for the future of creativity. The Pollockizer can produce drip paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock, Botnik spins off fanciful (if improbable) scenes inspired by J. K. Rowling, and the music-composing algorithm Emmy managed to fool a panel of Bach experts. But do these programs just mimic, or do they have what it takes to create? Du Sautoy argues that to answer this question, we need to understand how the algorithms that drive them work―and this brings him back to his own subject of mathematics, with its puzzles, constraints, and enticing possibilities.
While most recent books on AI focus on the future of work, The Creativity Code moves us to the forefront of creative new technologies and offers a more positive and unexpected vision of our future cohabitation with machines. It challenges us to reconsider what it means to be human―and to crack the creativity code.
...a crime-fictional site
Established in May 2011 by Marie Elena Good and Walter J Wojtanik, to help nurture and inspire the poetic spirit.
A place for poems and pics
a simple pairing of pictures and poetry
Sharing Poetry and Hugs
Persistent WV Poet
A.I. Art and Poetry
short writing prompts
I am the way and the reality and the life...John 14:6
Submit your film, screenplay, novel, to the festival and get it showcased at the FEEDBACK Festival. Full Feedback on all entries.
Author page of JR Handley, a veteran who writes military science fiction to excise the demons of his time spent fighting in the Late Unpleasantness in Mesopotamia.
The Writing Train: Join the locomotion 