Author: Jennifer Wilber

Stardust and Ash

Posted on by Jennifer Wilber

I’ve recently begun to process of revising all of the science fiction short stories I published in as an eBook entitled Stardust and Ash years ago and moving them to Letterpile.com. I’ve removed the eBook from Amazon and Smashwords in preparation of the move, and now I’m working on revising each story before republishing them online. I feel like my old writing can be greatly improved, especially works that I published before I finished my bachelor degree in creative writing, so I want to revise a lot of it before re-releasing it to the public.

I feel like short stories might work better as freely available web content than as eBooks anyway. I know short stories, poetry, etc doesn’t bring in a whole lot of search traffic, but my stories will be more easily accessible this way. They will also be available to read for free, while also allowing me to earn a little bit of revenue through ads.

In addition to the stories, I published all of the poetry that originally appeared in Stardust and Ash on Letterpile: Outer Space Poems: A Selection of Science Fiction Poetry. These are sci-fi themed poems that appeared in between each story of Stardust and Ash. I originally wrote most of them specifically for the book. I wrote the original version of Civil War in high school, however.

I also just posted a revision of my short story Abduction to Letterpile.

I’m also in the very, very early planning stages of a new novel that I hope to publish eventually. I hope to get most of the planning and outlining done by November, and write the first 50,000 words of the first draft during NaNoWriMo. Needless to say, publication for this book will still be a long way off.

“Portfolio Filter Gallery” WP Plugin First Impression

Posted on by Jennifer Wilber

I just switched my portfolio on this website from “WordPress Portfolio Plugin” by puravida1976 to “Portfolio Filter Gallery” by A WP Life. There were some things that weren’t working correctly on my site since updating, and I suspected it had to do with the old plugin, which doesn’t appear to be supported any longer.

This new plugin seems to be a lot less cumbersome to use so far and it looks nicer on my site. So far, in the one day since I’ve had it, I would recommend it for any writers who are looking for a portfolio plugin for their website. This plugin was designed more for visual artists, but it works well for my needs as a writer. It lets you upload an image and link it to your article or story on another website, and you can arrange each gallery however you like.

The only thing I noticed so far that I dislike about this plugin is that it only lets you make four categories (five total if you include the default “all” tag, which doesn’t seem to be removable) on the free version. If I find that I like this plugin enough to keep it, and don’t find a better alternative, I may be forced to upgrade to the paid version eventually. I’d really rather organize my articles by topic, but I’d prefer more than four.

Where to Find Free Photos for Your Writing

Posted on by Jennifer Wilber
Typewriter by Jill Wellington on Pixabay

The internet is a very visual medium. If you write for online audiences, you know how important it is to include relevant photos or other images with your written words to fully convey your ideas to the reader. If you are publishing your writing on your own website or blog, you are responsible for all of your own content, including the images. As a writer, you are probably more interested in writing new content than in producing images to go along with it, and if you don’t have much of a budget (or any budget) for your website, it may not be possible to purchase photos or hire a photographer for your projects. Luckily there are quite a few resources available where you can find high quality, free, royalty-free photos to use alongside your blog posts, articles, and stories.

For my articles, I do try to take my own photos to go with my writing whenever possible. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of gardening articles for Dengarden, so there are a lot of places where it makes the most sense to use pictures of my own garden and plants. I’m not the best photographer, and I just use my iPhone, but it works well enough for those kinds of articles. When I don’t have my own photographs to use, however, the first place I turn to is Pixabay.

Pixabay has tons of high quality royalty-free photographs available for free. The photos on this site are free to use for any project, including commercial projects. You don’t even have to give the photographers credit, according to the Pixabay licensing agreement, though I would recommend crediting the photographers whenever possible. It’s just the right thing to do.

Another free photography website is Pexels. I don’t use this one as often as Pixabay, but it has a similar licensing agreement, so you can safely use any photo you download there for your creative projects.

Sometimes for more academic subjects, I can’t find what I need on those free photos websites, so I use Wikimedia Commons instead. When you use Wikimedia Commons, you have to be sure to check the licensing terms for each individual image, as many require attribution or aren’t allowed to be used in certain ways.

There are a few other websites I occasionally check for free images, though the ones I’ve mentioned seem to be the best that I’ve discovered so far. Do you have a favorite place to get images for your articles or blog posts? Let me know in the comments!

Hello World

Posted on by Jennifer Wilber

It’s about time I started writing a blog on my website. It is a writing website, after all. I will share writing tips, useful resources for writers, and thoughts about writing, as well as occasional short updates about what is going on in my life (*yawn*). For more in-depth content on other topics of interest, I will continue writing articles for Maven Coalition’s HubPages Network sites. For my most recent articles, visit my HubPages profile. If you’re here because you are looking for information on how to get started writing for Maven/HubPages, you can sign up here. I’ll write a more detailed blog post about this in the future.

This blog is really just an effort to help promote my writing. I have also regained access to my old real-name Twitter account, so I will also be tweeting as @JenniferWilber, for anyone who cares to give me a follow. The process to regain access was quite a pain, let me tell you. Never sign up for things with an email tied to one of your domain names if you don’t intend to keep the domain long term… I was lucky to be able to get that email address/domain back for only $1. If younger me was better at picking website names that other people might actually want, it would have definitely been much more difficult/expensive.

Anyway, welcome to my new writing blog. Enjoy your stay.