A totally fun, fast read.

Described as the first zombie legal thriller, K. Bennett’s debut zombie novel did not disappoint me. Mallory Caine is an engaging heroine and the story was full of mystery, plot twists and moments that made me laugh. Although the writing styles are so different, this whole contemporary paranormal fantasy thing reminds me of the Mercy Thompson novels by Patrician Briggs. Good stuff.

The best part: the sequel is due out soon!

Relevant links:

• K. Bennett’s website
• Follow K. Bennett on Twitter
• Amazon.com link to buy “Pay Me In Flesh”

Just a little encouraging desktop background for my Christian peeps. Posted over at www.ChristianComputerWallpaper.com, one of my little web publishing ventures.

My dad took the photo on one of his trips to the Oregon coast! Thanks, Dad!

There are a ton of free WordPress themes out there, and many of them are excellent. If you can find a free one you like, go for it!

If, however, you don’t find a free one that suits you, turn your attention to the so-called “premium WordPress themes” — the ones you pay for.

Premium WordPress Theme Providers

Generally, you can expect to pay anywhere from $15-$120 for a good theme. Price is not necessarily an indicator of quality in this industry. Some $25 themes are just as good as the $100 themes a few clicks away. The really good deals are the ones where you can pay a little extra and get access to ALL their themes.

Sometimes you find a good theme by a designer who only created that one theme, but more often you find a collection of premium themes all in one place by one company or one designer. A few popular ones:

• Elegant Themes (my preferred provider at the moment)
• StudioPress (I have used a few of theirs)
• WooThemes (I have used one or two of theirs, and they have a magazine category)
• Templatic
• Mojo Themes (a marketplace where many designers can sell their themes)

How to Choose a Theme

When you’re looking at a theme demo (a sort of “preview” dummy website using the theme you’re considering purchasing), it can be tricky trying to imagine what your content will look like in that theme. It’s not always easy (or possible) to know what elements you’re looking at are “built in” and which are “content” that was added to flesh things out for the demo. One of these days I’ll do an article illustrating some basic guidelines for this, but for now all I can say it, “it’s hard to know for sure”.

That’s why it’s such a good deal when you can sign up with a theme provider that gives you access to ALL their themes for one price. If you find a provider whose overall design style you like, then you may have half a dozen of their themes that are potential matches for your project. WordPress allows you to “try out” a theme on your website so easily, and if you don’t like one of them, try another until you find one that works for you.

A $40 or $100 subscription to a theme club is still FAR less expensive than a $2,000-$4,000 custom-designed WordPress website.

Without Further Ado — The Themes

Click on any of the thumbnail screenshots to see a live demo of the theme. Some of the demo’s are even customizable (you can change colors and textures interactively).

Aggregate

Bold

Chameleon

Delicate News

eNews

Glow

TheSource

TheStyle

Who’s Who

Check out the rest of the Elegant Themes collection here:

Full Disclosure: While this may look like some sort of blatant promotion of my Elegant Themes affiliate link, it’s really something else. A friend was asking about magazine-style WordPress themes, and since I have a membership with a top-notch theme club, I looked around the Elegant Themes archives and found nine beautiful magazine themes.

I bought a membership with ET because they make good stuff. Their designs are beautiful to the eye, they’re easy to use, they’re fun to customize. I’m a fan. I’m a customer. And now I’m an affiliate. So if you click my link to them and sign up, I’ll get a commission. As always, I recommend them because they rock, not because they give me money.

SakuraCon by heath_bar on Flickr

Recently, as modes and methods of storytelling multiply and morph (yeah, say that five times fast), I’ve begun to consider my fiction stories in terms of movies vs. TV series.

It’s a simple concept: a novel is like a movie. It can be stand-alone and needs to tell the whole story in one big chunk. Sure, you can have sequels, but you don’t have to. For a long, long time, when people considered writing “real fiction”, they assumed it would be a novel. A book was how you told a story and got it into the hands of your audience.

Of course, there were always shorter, serial stories, but they were either written a hundred years ago or relegated to small, niche markets. Comic books were serialized. A few fiction magazines might have run serials. But this was NOT the mainstream. (Am I wrong?)

Then along came manga.

Story as a Series

Oh, manga, how I enjoy thee! By the time a Japanese comic book series (aka manga) was released in the U.S., it had already walked through the fire and become popular in Japan. It was then compiled into volumes to sell over here (well, that and being scanned and posted online by “pirates” aka fans who translated it themselves to share the manga love with their non-Japanese-speaking friends).

One of the lovely things about manga was that it was volume after volume of drama (or action or suspense or horror or romance), enriched with character after fascinating character until you had a core cast of 12-20, and illustrated in a variety of styles. The story would go on and on and take its time getting to the end. Some manga authors handled this well, and you never felt like it was dragging. Others you wanted to strangle but somehow they kept you coming back anyway. There was something for everyone, and there was enough to keep you going for months. Or years. Some manga series wrapped up neatly after 10 volumes. Some are 50 volumes and still counting. It was like a TV series between two covers that you didn’t need electricity to watch. Er, well, at least during the daytime.

With the advent of manga, part of the U.S. audience learned to read (and love) serialized fiction. It is my belief that the story-reading world is totally poised to start enjoying fiction outside the usual novel/book format. Far beyond the relatively small readership of manga, we have something else that has taught America how to enjoy serialized stories. I’ll get to that in a second.

Now, I wouldn’t want to read a regular novel chapter by chapter. Would you? I like reading at my own speed and being able to stay up all night to finish the story if I want to. If it were a regular novel, I’d wait until the whole thing was released and buy that — not read it bit by bit.

BUT. What if the chapters were actually “episodes”?

We do it with TV all the time. We’re totally used to it, in fact. You can tell a long, involved story (a la Babylon 5) or you can intersperse episodes that move the over-arching plot forward with other episodes that reveal the inner workings of the characters or just have fun with strange new aliens (a la Star Trek Voyager). And as long as each episode gives us a satisfying emotional experience and a sense of resolution, then it’s okay if it also introduces new mysteries or challenges for next week’s episode. Ah, now we’re talking!

Emotional Attachment

Consider this: It’s a simple fact that SPENDING TIME WITH YOUR CHARACTERS will create a place in the audience’s heart. It will create emotional attachment. (Assuming you’re a fine writer and your characters are engaging, etc, etc, etc.) Whether TV episodes or manga or book series, loyalty and desire and enjoyment increase with every hour invested in the relationship with the characters.

Why else are Trekkies such fanatics? Fans will debate whether Kirk is better than Picard until they’re blue in the face, and love every minute of it. They’ll recount lines of dialogue between Kirk and Spock and Bones and Scotty, and revel in it every time. Well, okay, maybe Trekkies are just weird, but you get the idea.

Mission Impossible, James Bond, Perry Mason, Leave it to Beaver, Sherlock Holmes, The Lord of the Rings, a bazillion soap operas I never watched, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Lost, White Collar, Friends, The A Team, G.I. Joe, okay, so I don’t pay enough attention to be able to rattle off a bunch of good examples, but I think you can fill in the blanks.

People (for good or ill) love to get addicted to a series of stories about the same engaging characters. And if you like to write that kind of story (or series of stories), today’s world is opening a bunch of opportunities just for you.

Caveat

Of course, not every writer wants to write like this. Not every reader wants to invest in a series.

Not every story should be told this way.

The important thing right now is to remember to ASK YOURSELF the question! “What format best suits my story? Is it a book or a series of episodes? A movie or a TV series?”

The Opportunity

Think about people who are using the Kindle and other e-readers. There’s more and more ways to offer content piecemeal or via subscription. What about subscription websites and RSS feeds? Direct fiction subscription feeds to your phone via mobile app?

It’s a wild frontier out there, and not everybody’s ready to embrace it. But it’s happening, whether you jump into the fray or not. And I’m strapping on my harness and bungee cord, ’cause that cliff is lookin’ mighty fine to me. If at first I don’t succeed, I’ll bounce back and try it again. You should, too!

Join the conversation

What TV series has most engaged you and left a lasting memory of the characters and what they experienced?

Do you prefer stand-alone books and movies? Or ongoing stories with the same characters?

Are you writing something right now that could work better as a series of episodes?

http://techgnotic.deviantart.com/journal/Odyssey-Into-2012-272543956

Some day, when my stories have a following, I want to have a fan fic contest and run it something like this one! What fun!

The McDavid Group website

They’re all set up to maintain their own website via WordPress, so their sites may or may not look anything like these screenshots anymore. Ah, the joys of birthing websites just to immediately hand them over for clients to raise… Do well, dear clients, do well!

The Mobidrives website

Two more sites are in the wings, waiting for the client to finish inputting the content. Regardless of the separation issues all mothers experience, it’s pretty exciting to put the power to press the “launch” button in the hands of my clients. WordPress rocks!

Pretty cool stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Well, last month (November 2011) I participated in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. It was my first time, although I’ve thought about doing it for the past couple of years.

The bad news is that I didn’t reach the 50,000 word goal. I got about 2,000 words of actual story writing.

The good news is that my fiction writing has gone from a standstill to a crawl. And continues crawling forward!

Science fiction authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick are reviewed and discussed by Ridley Scott and fun people in various scientific fields.

It’s been stimulating to revisit stories and authors I enjoyed growing up from a different angle — how what they wrote has become our modern-day life!

Customized WordPress website

This project was a refreshing break from the typical corporate website. My client is actually the girlfriend of the guy on the site, and she’s a joy to work with. I had so much fun making her vision for this workout website a reality.

Besides customizing a theme for them, I helped them improve their logo for use on the web and did the photoshopping (photo-editing) for the background and other graphics.

Photo of Massa before and after

Help this startup exercise website get off the ground by liking them on Facebook or subscribing to their RSS feed or YouTube channel!

Do some of those exercises for a while, and you’ll get all buff, too! But don’t ask me to do your website unless you’re female. My husband and I have agreed it’s best that from now on I limit my photo-editing buff guys in their underwear to family members. (Ha ha!)