Don't Quit Your Day Job

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." ~ Maya Angelou

T.S. Eliot didn't quit his day job. In fact, he composed "The Waste Land" while working at Lloyd's Bank.

And did literary fame and fortune change his working ways? Nope. He joined the publishing house we now know as Faber & Faber, and went on to publish Ted Hughes and W.H. Auden among other household names.

Look, I know you're busy. But you contain multitudes, friend. Let's write about those crazy stories.  We can do it together.

Sign up for ANI Online here http://www.anovelideanashville.com/#!jumpstart/c1vy3

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Free the Story Within: ANI Online for Adults

"Psst!"
"Yeah, you! Over here."
"Hey, I'm that story you've been promising to write for years. And I'm starting to feel neglected and depressed. I'm dying in here. Your brain is crammed with grocery lists and office memos and it's getting really crowded and uncomfortable in here. Please let me out."

The wait is over.

ANI for adults is now online.

Registration is easy: click here 

Class is limited to 20 participants. Better get on it, buddy.
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Kristen House
Chief Executive Muse
A Novel Idea
 

Write your NaNoWriMo novel with Now Novel

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and what better time to finally start – and finish – that novel you’ve been wanting to write? Now Novel (www.nownovel.com) is an online novel writing course that leads aspiring authors through a step-by-step process to finishing their novels.

Through a series of in-depth question and answer sections, Now Novel helps you find your central idea, develop your plot and setting, create in-depth character studies, and put it all together with a custom-made skeleton that tells you what has to happen, and when. They also have a weekly emailer, a blog, Facebook page and forum, all tailored towards keeping you motivated and getting you to finish your novel.

Bridget McNulty is one of the co-founders of Now Novel, and a published author herself. Her first novel, Strange Nervous Laughter, was published in South Africa and the USA, and she was quickly inundated with queries about how to write a novel. “People kept emailing me and asking how to start their novels,” she says, “But it’s not really a quick answer. Now Novel is the result of all the knowledge I gained from studying creative writing in South Africa and the US.”

Now Novel is running a special on their course for NaNoWriMo. For this month only, you can get the course for only $9.99 – find out more here: http://www.nownovel.com/home/nanowrimo

Learn to Work with MS Word

Yvonne Perry teaches classes on the advanced features of Microsoft Word. The fee is only $25 per 30-minutes of individual instruction. These sessions are conducted via telephone as you sit in front of your computer and work through the exercises while the instructor walks you through what to do. You can take as many or as few of the classes you want.

When you pay for a class, Yvonne will contact you to set up a time for the phone call.

Instruction is offered on the following topics:

• Tracking changes and adding comments allows you to pass a document back and forth between recipients and see the changes made by each one. It also allows each editor to make comments in the side margin. 
  
• Working with styles is a very important feature of Word. It allows you to change all the text of a certain style with one click rather than having to select each instance individually. You cannot create a hyperlinked table of contents without first setting the styles for these headings.
  
• Paragraph Spacing: You hit the return key and there's too much space between the text, so you tab or space to the end of a line rather than pressing the Enter key. In this class you will learn to adjust paragraph indentations, set the distance between paragraphs, bullet points, and numbered lists. Learn to alphabetically sort a long list of text.
  
• Working with Text: Apply or remove highlighting, change font types, size, and colors; and modify text for bold, italic, underline, superscript, and subscript.
  
• Insert and format page numbers in the the headers or footers of your document. This is a basic class that leads into learning about section breaks (see next class below).
  
• Creating section breaks between chapters. A must-have class for authors who want to format their own books. This is an hour-long class due to the intricacies of this feature. You will learn how to create a different first page, and unique odd/even pages., allowing you to have your chapter heading on one side of the page and your book title on the other side.
  
• Working Faster. Use format painter; manage multiple copied items on your clipboard; use keyboard shortcuts; record macros; create hyperlinks and bookmarks to make getting around in your document much faster and easier.
  
• Graphic Formatting. Work with pictures, shapes, and graphics so the text wraps around an image; create colored borders of varying weight around images; work with WordArt, clip art, drop case, and text boxes; set margins, page size, backgrounds, watermarks, and borders. Due to the amount of material covered, this class is one hour long.
  
• If your document is too long, has too many words or is too verbose, you may want to shorten it without losing the main thoughts. You can set the percentage to hide or show more or less of your document using the Auto Summary Feature.
  

If there is a topic you want specific help with, Yvonne will work with you individually by the hour or half-hour.

Authors Must Learn to Sell What They Write

Carol Batey and I will be teaching a teleclass this Wednesday, May 4 on what it takes to sell your books online. During the call, we will go over each of the following items and tell why authors must do their own book promotion no matter how they publish.

What of these things have you done to market your books?

____ Create a marketing plan in Excel or a planner
____ Maintain a blog specifically for the book
____ Get domain names and build a Web site for the book
____ Get endorsements
____ Get book reviews
____ Obtain radio, TV, newspaper, and magazine interviews
____ Create promotional videos and post them to YouTube
____ Conduct a book tour (in-person or online)
____ Participate in the online launch of other authors’ books
____ Write and send media releases
____ Write and post articles to online article directories
____ Write and send articles to print magazines
____ Participate in online forums pertaining to your topic
____ Social marketing such as Facebook or Twitter
____ Comment on and link to other peoples’ blogs

To learn how and why each of these will help you sell books, join Yvonne Perry and Carol Batey for a teleclass, “Authors Must Learn to Sell What They Write” on May 4 at 7 PM.

Get the mp3 recording of the call!
http://weare1inspirit.com/workshops.htm

There will be an MP3 available for those who miss the call. Simply register now and we'll either send you the call-in info or the MP3—whichever is applicable at that date/time.