Sonya Weiss

Where Happily Ever After Begins

Before I Die

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booksI finished the fiction novel ‘Before I Die’ written by Jenny Downham. The book was extremely powerful. It’s a story about Tessa, a teenage girl battling cancer.

There is beauty and ugliness, hope and despair, longing and acceptance within the 327 pages of the novel. The way the author wrote the ending showcased her extreme skill as a writer.

From the caregiver father, to the flighty and at times selfish mother to the little brother, the characters live and breathe in the pages and stay with you long after you’ve cried over the last word. Definitely one for the keeper shelf.

Popularity-How to Bring More Eyes to Your Site

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eyesPopularity isn’t everything. Except…when it comes to websites. You want your website to rank high in Google so that more people can find it and find you and your wonderful books and stories.

There are three things your website needs in order to rank well: keywords, relevant content, freshness.

1. Keywords are how people search for things on the Internet. Go to Google’s Keyword tool here and type in the words you want to use for your site. You’ll be able to see how many searches are done for those words both globally and locally. You want words that rank high in searches.

2. Relevant content is content (writing, testimonials etc.) that persuades people to buy your book or stories or lecture packets. There’s also a way for images to rank if you use the alt code. If you want more information about that, just ask me and I’ll explain.

3. Freshness means you update regularly. Google uses automated ‘bots’ that crawl the Internet and outdated sites don’t rank well.

For more about how to make your website more noticeable, look for tutorials on Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.

Butt-B-Gone: The Amazing Cure for Writer’s Butt!!

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The spread latches on before you know it’s there…a moment of chocolate here….wrestling with the words versus wrestling with exercise…the dreaded Butt Widening is what the Inner Critic curses writers with when they won’t give up writing.

If you’re a determined writer, then ACT NOW!

You can stop Writer’s Butt before it gets worse with Butt-B-Gone. One application will have you jumping up to do the laundry, check the mail, chat on the phone and more!

So how is this relevant to writing?

Advertisers know how to grab your attention through commercials. They use the silly, the funny, stuff that makes you hungry or makes you desire/dream (for the house, the car, the vacation, the hot guy in the towel) or even stuff that makes you mad.

See this example for an attention grabber .

Ads that stick out in your mind are the ones that reached past all the daily noise and interested you enough to make you keep watching/listening/reading.

That’s what you have to do with writing. Cut through the daily noise, cut through the mundane, cut through the hundreds or thousands of unnecessary words.

How do you cut through?

Think like someone who writes ads. Don’t waste words-don’t use four hundred words when one sentence will tell the reader what’s going on.

Open with the unexpected. Open with trouble. Open with a question.

(Butt-B-Gone patent pending) 😉