Brandon Sanderson's Description & Viewpoint

Brandon Sanderson's Description and Viewpoint videos on Youtube were a pleasant surprise as we are invited into a workshop at Jordoncon 2010. (http://www.jordancon.org/)

He showed how to chart out four characters walking through a castle market, highlighting what their interests and plot might be. List four jobs and the sex of each character with an unexpected personality trait that would make them interesting, and follow it with five things they might notice if they walked through a market. Finally, two additional pieces of character plot are added under how to evoke plot. One column would look like this:

Jester/Musician - girl
Unexpected personality - Hates her job
She will notice - sounds, hears laughter and hates it, competitions, marks, and currency
How to evoke plot - she is in debt, love interest who doesn't know she hates her job

These would be put into a table to organize them. I found color coding key items help.
This quick exercise aids in making convincing characters that can be written in such a way by writing about the things they would notice as a means of describing the unexpected personality trait.

E-Publishing

The Cornwall Writing Group met on Saturday and we shared our 250 word stories. Their feedback is invaluable in eliminating useless words and sharpen the story. Publishing is the goal after all. Amanda Hocking has captured a lot of attention by earning $2,000,000.00 for her stories without having a publisher. Her story is a motivation to edit, re-edit, and edit again in order to self-publish.
You can find her blog at: http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/

After some searching the following websites were helpful:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-to-make-money-on-ebooks.html

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin

http://reviews.cnet.com/how-to-self-publish-an-e-book