Today’s Xulon Press Successful Author Spotlight showcases world renowned speaker Dr. Deborah Starczewski, evangelist, teacher and author of “A Leap of Faith: 25 days at the Mercy Seat” which was published by Xulon Press in 2013, recounting her life changing experiences [...]
I love the month of October. Football season is in full swing, pumpkin coffee permeates the air at the coffee shop where I write and—mysteriously—crystal dishes of mini chocolate bars appear on every desk. In Florida, we don’t get the same spectacle of changing forestry as other regions, but the temp drops below ninety, teasing you with the promise of sweater-weather and the advent of the holiday season. I like to think of October as the Faberge egg of the calendar: gorgeous and glittering on the outside, just waiting to be opened so it can spill the sparkling jewels of…
If you ask me, the most painstaking part of writing anything is the documentation of sources. It’s such tedious work, but do we even know why we do it? “Ethics, copyright laws and courtesy to readers require authors to identify sources of direct quotations or paraphrases and of any facts or opinions not generally known or easily checked,” says the Chicago Manual of Style (pg. 655). Now, we know why we provide sources for the quoted material in our books, but there are still two questions left to be answered: which system should be used and what’s the difference between…
I confess: I started to do a bit of research on the history of the Foreword and had to force myself to stop almost immediately when I began deeper investigation of philology and the Dutch, or possibly German, roots of the word itself. (It happens like that for me sometimes. Research is addicting.) A previous post, Front Matters, explained the traditional intentions of some of the bits of, yes, front matter, the introductory sections that precede the beginning of your story proper. This being Academia month, we thought we’d focus on an element of FM (that’s industry lingo for front…