Why Didn’t I Know This?!

I’m a resource nerd- new information makes me happy. Through a blog, I found out about The Alliance of Independent Authors. Seriously. How couldn’t I have known about this? I make a point of knowing all the great publishing resources out there, at least the ones that apply to me.

The Alliance of Independent Authors is the first non-profit organization for self-published authors. It’s:

“A…collaborative collective of independent self-publishing writers. [They] invite such writers to join together in a spirit of mutual co-operation, empowerment and service to the reading and writing community.” (Alliance of Independent Authors)

“The Alliance will become… “an advocate, and campaigning voice, as self-publishing writers are currently unrepresented within the literary and publishing industries — often voiceless, excluded from most other writing [organizations] on largely spurious grounds, asked to pay for reviews, rarely invited to literary events or conferences.”(Taleist)

Sounds like a support group for indie authors. What a brilliant idea. I’m not self-published yet but even I feel like my head’s about to explode when thinking about what I still have to do. The Alliance launched maybe two months ago. I hope it stays around.

Through another blog, I learned of The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression.

Still don’t know how I came across this, wasn’t looking for anything remotely close to this. It never occurred to me a thesaurus other than the standard one existed.

“One of the biggest problem areas for writers is conveying a character’s emotions to the reader in a unique, compelling way. This book comes to the rescue by highlighting 75 emotions and listing the possible body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for each. Written in an easy-to-navigate list format, readers can draw inspiration from character cues that range in intensity to match any emotional moment. The Emotion Thesaurus also tackles common emotion-related writing problems and provides methods to overcome them. This writing tool encourages writers to show, not tell emotion and is a creative brainstorming resource for any fiction project.” (Amazon)

Now, I’m really excited especially since it’s gotten such great reviews- by regular readers, I don’t pay attention to critic reviews. This made my day. Another amazing idea. I do tend to lean on the same words when describing emotions. The Emotion Thesaurus is also new- published last month. Fun!

What can I say, I’m a sucker for some good resources.