Writing isn’t always logical. The inspiration does not always follow the flow that you believe it should. If you get hung up on what you think you should be writing next, you could find that your words stop flowing. Your words can get stuck behind a cork in a bottle.

I write blog posts, articles for sale, and books which are available in paperback and on Kindle. As long as I write what’s ready to come out, the words never stop flowing. Running out of words has never been a problem until recently, when I allowed logic to dictate what I should be writing rather than going with the flow.

I had already written and released a dog book, Bad Dog to Best Friend, and had the raw material for two more dog books. Logic would dictate that I should follow a dog book with another dog book, except it wasn’t a dog book that wanted to come out.

Next out the door was a Yankee in the South book which mentioned a booger dog in passing, following by a book for spouses of coin collectors, followed by an astrophysical murder mystery in which the word “dog” probably only appears once in relation to Isaac Newton’s dog.

Sometimes you have to follow your motivation and throw logic out the window. By letting go of the idea that a specific book or article should be next, you can open the door to let a flood of articles, books, or blog posts out the door. The words are always there but sometimes you have to let them channel themselves in their own way.

Once I stopped fighting it and embraced the flow, the words came out like a veritable gusher. Not only were the words flowing as fast as I could type them, the ideas were coming one after another bringing the most bizarre connections. I’d be writing about some obscure fact and I’d find a connection between that fact and another seemingly unrelated fact.

This was happening so often that I was in awe. It was almost as if the backstory of the astrophysical murder mystery book was writing itself. Was I plugged into some higher power that was feeding me the story? Was there a higher power guiding my words? The facts were truly stranger than fiction and they came together with such ease that I could not help but wonder if someone wanted the backstory told.

The astrophysical mystery started out as a work of fiction but by the time it was finished, there were so many bizarre and unusual facts that I ended up including a bibliography at the end. For anyone who would take an interest in strange facts as I do, the bibliography would allow them to answer questions such as, “Is this even possible? Could that be real? Did such a thing actually happen? Does that item exist? Was he a real person?” Only time will tell if I’ve found a niche among my fellow oddballs of the world.

So the next time you’re stuck like a cork in a bottle, take a step back and completely clear your mind of all logic. Clear your mind of what you THINK you should be writing. Pretend you’ve got a day off and can write whatever feels good in the moment. Embrace the flow of words that want to come out and let them take you on a journey. Tell yourself that it’s okay to write something totally unexpected, totally illogical, and totally off the predicted path. Follow your words and you will be amazed at the place they will take you. Pop that cork out of the bottle and watch the words come gushing out!

When you’re an Indie writer you don’t have a publisher directing you on changes to be made for spelling, grammar, wording, story flow, and so forth. So how do you know when the book is done?

For spelling and grammar you rely in part on programs such as Word, but you shouldn’t stop there. Just because a book passes the spellchecker doesn’t mean that there are no errors. Four example, in this sentence yew can sea how easily the spellchecker can miss errs. In addition, a book with a lot of dialog will have errors simply because people do not speak with perfect wording and grammar, so you must rely on your own ability to find errors simply by reading the book.

A good writer can find something to tweak every single time they go back over it, so when do you close the book and say that Done is Done? Part of you wants to let it go out into the world and part of you strives for perfection, creating a tug of war.

As long as you are adding to, or deleting from, the actual storyline, the book isn’t done yet. If you are rewording sentences, moving sentences around, or frowning over certain passages, the book isn’t done yet. When something is tugging at you because it just doesn’t feel right, the book isn’t done yet. When you look at the cover image and have lukewarm emotions about it, the book isn’t done yet.

When you get to the point where the changes you are making are small potatoes, that’s when you know that the story is done. When you can look at the cover image and smile… when you can read the book and enjoy the story rather than finding things to nitpick over… THAT’S when you know it’s time to let go and send your child out into the world to make friends.

Like most Indie writers, I have a day job. Yesterday the schools were closed for a holiday so the boss brought her daughter and friend to work for the day. These two girls were fourteenish and I was put in charge of helping them print their homework out on the computer.

The friend sat across from me and spent a couple hours working diligently on her homework assignment. When she was finished with her homework I printed it out for her.

I noticed immediately that there was a spelling error so like a teacher correcting a test paper I circled the word in red. I did not tell her the correct spelling, only that the word was in error.

There turned out to be a number of errors and every time she’d fix an error, she’d add a new one. When the other girl came in to check on her, she told the girl that the spellchecker on the computer had missed a word.

I thought to myself, “Say WHAT?!” Surely you are kidding me! This felt wrong on so many levels. First of all, spellcheckers do not miss words that are spelled wrong unless the boo boo is actually a real word. Secondly, nobody should rely solely on a spellchecker; everyone should read the final version with their own eyes to look for errors. And finally, I couldn’t help but wonder if kids were no longer expected to know how to spell a word.

One word that she’d misspelled was “belief.” She had spelled it “beleif.” A spellchecker would have caught that so she must not have run the spellchecker. I asked her if she knew the rule for determining whether it should be “ie” or “ei” and she said no. That rule was so ingrained in us back in the day.

“I” before “e”, except after “c”, or when sounded as “a” as in “neighbor” and “weigh.” That’s the rule I was taught in school. So in spelling the word “belief”, it would be “i” before “e” as it doesn’t come after a “c” and it doesn’t rhyme with “day.”

Another word that she misspelled was “character.” She’d spelled it “charter” three different times. The spellchecker would not have flagged it since “charter” is an actual word. The only way to catch such an error is to proofread it for yourself without relying on a computer program to do all the work.

This girl went through so many revisions that I was dumbfounded. I have no idea what they teach in school nowadays but if she is any indication, the Board of Education should be forced to watch the movie Idiocracy which was written, directed and produced by Mike Judge. I could not help but wonder if I were witnessing the dumbing down of America as showcased in the movie.

I discovered that Bad Dog to Best Friend had a new rating on Goodreads and the rating, which did not include any comments, floored me. This girl had given the book two stars. While many readers don’t rate books, they simply read them, I’ve had some very positive feedback from a number of folks privately so I was not expecting two stars.

In looking at her overall rating which covered 381 books, her average rating was 2.9 stars which meant that she didn’t like much of what she read. Still, her rating had really cranked up my misery meter. I had to know where Bad Dog to Best Friend stood among her other books so I started looking at her ratings book-by-book.

When I saw the list of books that she’d ranked only three stars, I felt considerably better. Among her three star ratings were: Forrest Gump, The Color Purple, Marley and Me, The Joy Luck Club, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Brave New World, 1984, Da Vinci Code, Call of the Wild, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Help, The Diary of Anne Frank, Gone With the Wind, Catcher in the Rye, Hamlet, The Odyssey, War and Peace, Romeo and Juliet, and Sybil, the incredible story of the woman with 16 personalities that became a hit movie starring Sally Field back in the day.

Dark Places and Misery were rare books that she ranked four stars. I found an odd sense of comfort in that. How To Kill a Rock Star rated five stars.

I was neck-to-neck with the Twilight books, all of which got two stars from her just like me. Angela’s Ashes, The Art of Racing in the Rain, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance also received a mere two stars.

Being ranked just one star less than Marley and Me took a lot of the sting out of her rating, and knowing that she considered my book as good as The Art of Racing in the Rain erased the sting completely. More than thirty thousand readers have rated that book and it averages out at 4.06 stars, but for this girl it got only two, just like Bad Dog to Best Friend.

If you’d like to read the book that ranked just one star less than Marley and Me, and even steven with The Art of Racing in the Rain, you can read Bad Dog to Best Friend on your Kindle for only $2.99. The paperback version is $9.95 and includes several black and white photos.

It’s hard being an indie author and pounding the pavement to sell your book without the weight of a big publishing house behind you, especially if it’s your first public book and you’re learning the ropes.

Bad Dog to Best Friend isn’t the first book I’ve written but it’s the first to go public and become available on Amazon.com.  It’s the first book I’ve had to figure out how to sell and it’s the first book to get me banned from posting to Photobucket.

One thing I’m good at is writing to my blog and building a website so of course I started with those but there’s so much more an indie author needs to do to get their name and their book in front of people.

Some authors swear by Facebook and Twitter, neither of which I’m good at.  The little voice keeps telling me to do what I do best, blog.  It tells me to show people my strange side, like the Wall of Weird on Smallville.  The little voice has talked to me for two decades and the one thing I know is that it’s smarter than I am.

To that end I started sharing my ghost stories on my blog and yes, people found them.  They didn’t buy dog books but they flocked to read the ghost stories which brings me in a very roundabout way to the subject at hand – how I got banned from Photobucket.

I’ve never had a Photobucket account before and from what I read on their website they were all about sharing your photos, videos, etc.  Other authors were using them to post their video book trailers and it seemed worth a shot so I opened an account.

I attempted to upload one of the Bad Dog to Best Friend video book trailers and the upload failed to finish.  Three times I tried and three times I got an error message saying sorry, something went wrong and the upload didn’t take.

To be honest I don’t remember which video I attempted to upload.  I may have tried uploading the long one first and then assumed it was too big for them to handle and then tried the shorter one.  I don’t know, who remembers such details?  All I know is that I never got a SUCCESS, your video has been uploaded message and I gave up.

A few days later I got an email from Photobucket.  It was short and to the point:  “Unfortunately your account has been banned because it violated our terms of service. These terms apply to both free and premium accounts. — Admin.”

Say what?  Banned?  But why?!  Unfortunately the email did not say.  The entire text of the email is what I posted here which leaves me muddling with the possibilities of what I could have possibly done that was so bad as to get me banned from Photobucket.

I did attempt to log in to make sure this wasn’t some spammy email pretending to be from Photobucket.  The ban was real.  It would not let me log in and across the top of the window it offered the cryptic phrase:  “Account banned for violating TOS!”

I went back and tried to pour over all their fine print to see where I might have failed.  What baffled me is that the videos never even uploaded to the best of my knowledge so was it the content of the videos or something else that triggered the ban?

Did they think that my domain name “gityasome”  was a dirty girly site or something?  The main gityasome.com sells my t-shirt designs while books.gityasome.com sells the Bad Dog to Best Friend book.  Perhaps the t-shirt designs were offensive?  Sports, animals, beer, pirates, hippies, happy thoughts, grumpy thoughts, politics, holidays – just your standard t-shirt fare.

Bad Dog to Best Friend is a positive, feel-good, happy ending dog book about a two-time shelter dog who finds her forever home.  In spite of all her problems we fix her, retrain her (offering up the full details of how we did it) and end the book on a happy dog note.  How could that possibly offend anyone?

There’s no hatred, violence, racism, harrassment, nudity, sex, drugs or rock and roll anywhere in the book or videos.  According to their TOS “spimming” will get you in hot water, too, except that I’ve never heard of it.  There’s no illegal activity, fraud or stalking involved.  I’m not selling a Ponzi scheme, pyramid scheme or any trade secrets.

They mention using the photograph of a person without their consent.  The only photos involved are of me and my dog.  Surely I didn’t need our consent?  Surely they didn’t think I was impersonating someone or making illicit videos of someone else’s dog?

In the middle of the long video book trailer is what’s supposed to be a humerous skit about Dakota being bad in her crate.  Instead of highlighting bad dog behavior it shows a partying dog with a clown hat, empty pizza box, empty generic beer can, and it says “Party Like A Dog!”  Maybe that phrase was trademarked and got me ousted?  I tested the theory searching the trademark database but nope, that wasn’t it.  Maybe it was the sentiment itself?  Maybe the video was just boring although I didn’t see “boring” mentioned in the TOS.

In spite of the videos failing to upload, I couldn’t help but wonder if they actually had uploaded and I just got the wrong message.  Perhaps attempting to upload three times in succession is what got me outed.  I’m just an indie author fumbling for an answer to a totally baffling question:  What was so bad as to get me completely banned from Photobucket?

Also mentioned in their Terms of Service is the display of advertising without their permission on a non-commercial account.  I don’t remember having to choose an account type but if that was the failure, surely they could have just banned the video book trailer itself and not me?  Surely they could have had a big blurb telling me the difference between the two accounts before I chose one?  I dunno, I’m just guessing.  I didn’t make a log of the sign up process.  I know I was heavy headed when I signed up, coming down with the flu or something.  I know I wanted to post the video in as many places as possible to get the word out and signing up with a gazillion new websites is time-consuming so maybe I didn’t read something as meticulously as I should have.

I will never know, but Bad Dog to Best Friend will forever go down in history as the book that got me banned from Photobucket.

Short version of the video book trailer (includes music and chapter list):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU6l1XhJpWw

Long version (Dakota telling her story and the Party Like a Dog skit):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0DCKBliAqU

I was going to release a short story on Kindle but my beta reader talked me out of it. I wrote it about 15 years ago and I was editing it for new release. I turned it over to him and he gave it back with a sour puss.

He said, “Christians will be really upset with you for making up a story about God. Non-Christians will be really upset with you for tricking them into reading a religious story.” Okay, well that pretty much covers everybody.

I took a piece of advice that was given in the Bible that wasn’t even one of the Ten Commandments, something everybody has heard a million times, and turned it into a science fiction horror story to illustrate the advice to its fullest.

I haven’t given up on it, but for the moment it is shelved. He’s a huge sci fi fan and if it turned him into a sourpuss and he’s one of my biggest fans well.