This month’s video features a rather rambly list of thoughts for anyone who wants some perspectives on naming characters.

In this month’s video, I give some advice on what you might consider for your acknowledgments page.

This video does apply to folks who don’t have a book deal or even those who haven’t finished their books yet. Start keeping these things in mind now, and I promise it’ll save you a lot of headache later!

Here’s another new video from my writing channel offering a discussion of what it means to “write to the market” and what compromises you can expect to make if you want to be marketable.

Spoiler alert: The practical upshot here is that attempted trend-riding will get you nowhere, and attempting to be marketable should not lead you to compromise the soul of your work.

The “Strong Female Characters” title is in quotation marks because I mean it a little differently than people might think I do.

In this video, I explain how a “strong” female character is actually one that has agency and is an active participant in her own storyline. Often, these days, in a well-meaning attempt to diversify female characters and teach equality, writers and publishers are pushing an image of traditional femininity as weakness, and consequently presents girls and women in media who reject femininity and embrace more traditionally masculine attitudes, clothes, language, and roles as a way to show their strength. My video explains why this is not the only way to make a female character strong, and why we need other images of strength too.