In Defense of Opening Bands

“We should probably pay attention. This could be our new favorite band.”

Those were the wise words spoken by my BFF last week at the Magic Giant show. So many of the bands we love, including Magic Giant, we first heard as an opening band. And every time, we probably groaned about the fact that there were opening bands at all.

I was racking my brain, trying to think about where I had written about opening bands before, and then I remembered it was in the Epilogue of my first book, Front Row.

Read More

Going to Concerts in Your Thirties

You know you’re old when you notice girls in the crowd wearing the exact same outfits you would’ve worn twenty years ago.

That’s not to say it was all young twenty-somethings in the crowd last night at the Magic Giant show. There were other concertgoers in their thirties and forties…except most of them lined the perimeter of the coffee shop/concert venue, perched on bar stools or huddled around cafe tables. Not us though. Not this time.

Read More

Meet Sharnita Quickley

I’m getting very close to being ready to publish my second book in the Rockin’ Austen series, Sharnita with the Blue Nails. Today, I’m going to have Brit Byers, of Brit with the Pink Hair, introduce Sharnita to you and do a little interview. Enjoy!

Brit: Welcome, Sharnita. Or would you prefer Shar?

Shar: Either is perfect. Shouldn’t I be interviewing you though? You’re the famous one.

Brit: My dad’s the famous one. Anyway, this is about you, not me. You’re the one who’s been on TV before, right? Some singing show? What was that like?

Read More

How Technical Writing Made Me a Better Author

I’ve been in technical communications field for eight years now—first as a technical editor for six years, and currently as a technical writer for two years and counting. Regardless of what kind of products I was reading or writing about, or which company I was working for, the core skills remained the same. And I believe those skills have strengthened my work as a fiction writer as well.

Here are some of things technical editing and writing has taught me:

Pay attention to word choice and repetition.

Read More