The first step in the process is preparing the notquilt comforter. I dug through the stash and discovered some fabric with chickens on it, some fabric that looks like appliquéd quilt blocks, and some more fabric with Pennsylvania Dutch birds. All of these fabrics share similar themes, blah colors, are intensely country in style and, […]
Love and marriage, as Sinatra sang, may go together like a horse and carriage, but love and writing can get along like a house on fire, if you like yelling and screaming. There’s no doubt that having your spouse on your side can boost your writing career. From moral support to keeping the books to […]
This is the current NotQuilt project. The guts are an old comforter, very old. I have no idea where it came from. It’s for a queen-size bed. As with all NotQuilts, the size of the finished product is determined by the size of the filling. This one is being worked in a roundabout, bassackward fashion, […]
As I write this, there are 13 books on the shelf behind me. All of them have my name on them. One of them is “Writers Gone Wild,” published by Penguin. The rest are other people’s works I edited and annotated for my Peschel Press through CreateSpace. Fourteen inches of paper that I wrote or […]
For the last two weeks, we looked at the NotQuilts I’ve made for my family and friends. (part 1 and part 2). This week, we’ll finish with two wedding NotQuilts. Skull NotQuilt This wedding NotQuilt was made on a deadline. I wanted to make the happy couple something that would be personal and unique and […]
Today, we’ll be looking at two authors who found themselves in money trouble: Patricia Cornwell and Neal Gabler. It is a truism to remember that persons who do one thing very well does not qualify them as experts on everything, especially when it comes to money. Mark Twain’s investments in a typography machine threw him […]
Last week, we looked at some of the NotQuilts I’ve made for my family and friends. This week, we’ll look at more of them, so you can see how I evolved my techniques for designing NotQuilts. Our bedspread of the Night Sky This was the first one that I made that had a planned design. […]
At first, the idea of having a file system seems ludicrous, maybe even pretentious. You’re writing short stories, maybe sketches. A couple of printed pages. Maybe keeping a notebook. Not much of a threat to your sanity, right? A year of steady writing, however, and the situation has changed. You have a file cabinet, notebooks […]
To better understand the construction and thinking behind NotQuilts, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks displaying the ones I’ve made for my family and friends and the thinking that went into each design. I hope that you’ll take away from this that it is easier to make these than quilts, yet still […]
As you may have guessed, I’m writing “The Career Indie Author” in chunks. I already have a tentative table of contents written, and every time I have a spare moment, I sit down and hand write several pages of content. Building your indie publishing company takes time, and although the “CIA” covers a lot of […]