The Mukhtaar Estate is Now Open

May 17, 2017, 4:31 pm

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I’ve been receiving a lot of questions lately about writing, The Mukhtaar Chronicles, music, dogs, books…you name it. And they’ve been coming at me from about 10 different directions all at once. Well, I’ve finally decided to embrace the fact that I live on Facebook most of the time. Yes, I still respond on Twitter, and I always participate in discussions that take place in the comments section here at the blog. But I’m on Facebook ALL – OF – THE – TIME. It’s a sickness. You should feel sorry for me, really, now that I think about it. Anyway, I’m proud to announce the grand opening of The Mukhtaar Estate, a Facebook discussion group geared towards…well, it’s geared towards ...

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Get The Mukhtaar Chronicles on Kindle Countdown Now

May 21, 2017, 10:26 am

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The Kindle Countdown promotion on Necromancer Awakening and Necromancer Falling is still in the early stages, so get over to Amazon and grab copies of each before their prices return to normal! They’re currently $1.99 and will be gradually climbing back up to $3.99 over the next several days. Click the images or titles and they’ll take you to the appropriate Amazon page. Cheers! Nat   About Nat RussoNat Russo is the Amazon #1 Bestselling Fantasy author of Necromancer Awakening. Nat was born in New York, raised in Arizona, and has lived just about everywhere in-between. He’s gone from pizza maker, to radio DJ, to Catholic seminarian (in a Benedictine monastery, of all places), to police officer, to software engineer. ...

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Scrivener Auto Completion

June 25, 2017, 10:01 am

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Have you ever wished you didn’t have to type the same word or phrase over and over again in your manuscript? Maybe you have a tricky-to-spell character name, or you use a lot of technical terms? What if I told you that Scrivener can automatically type those words/phrases for you with the stroke of a key? In the above example, simply scrolling down to “Mukhtaar Lord” and pressing TAB will complete my sentence! This is a conveniently hidden feature called Auto-Completion. To activate the feature, complete the following steps: 1. Highlight the word or phrase you’d like Scrivener to type for you. 2. Right-click the selection. 3. Click “Add Selection to Auto-Complete List” Alternatively, you can open your “Project” menu ...

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Amazon Alleges Violations by KDP Authors, Publishers

September 10, 2017, 8:22 am

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Amazon is taking additional steps to fight abuse of the KDP system, including injunctive relief and triple damages. Is it too little too late, or just the beginning? Click the source link for the complete article on Publisher’s Weekly. Amazon has filed arbitration complaints against five individuals who it claims offered services to KDP authors and publishers intended to help them manipulate the reading platform for financial gain. Source: Amazon Alleges Violations by KDP Authors, Publishers About Nat RussoNat Russo is the Amazon #1 Bestselling Fantasy author of Necromancer Awakening. Nat was born in New York, raised in Arizona, and has lived just about everywhere in-between. He’s gone from pizza maker, to radio DJ, to Catholic seminarian (in a Benedictine ...

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Discount on The Mukhtaar Chronicles This Week

January 16, 2018, 7:21 am

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Hi friends! This week only, both Necromancer Awakening and Necromancer Falling, books one and two of the international bestselling fantasy series The Mukhtaar Chronicles, are on discount for $0.99! Additionally, the standalone novella The Road To Dar Rodon, which follows the adventure of a much younger Mujahid Mukhtaar as he journeys across Erindor seeking vengeance, is absolutely free! Sale ends Friday!                       About Nat RussoNat Russo is the Amazon #1 Bestselling Fantasy author of Necromancer Awakening. Nat was born in New York, raised in Arizona, and has lived just about everywhere in-between. He’s gone from pizza maker, to radio DJ, to Catholic seminarian (in a Benedictine monastery, of all places), ...

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Quora Names Russo Top Writer for 2018

March 16, 2018, 9:48 am

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I received a truly unexpected honor this morning. Jonathan Brill, Head of Global Writer Relations for Quora, reached out to me to inform me I’ve been named as one of their Top Writers for 2018. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the site, Quora is a question-and-answer site where anyone can sign up, post a question, and wait for answers to start rolling in. The awesome thing is that many of the people who are waiting to answer these questions are leaders in their industry, so the answers tend to be authoritative. I’ve been writing on Quora for about a year now, mostly on topics involving software engineering and computer programming. What makes this honor that much more ...

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Research Is Writing. Stop Berating Yourself.

April 22, 2018, 10:45 am

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The most important thing you’ll do for your story is to get the details right. Spending time on research is every bit as important as writing the prose. Why? Because research is writing. If you’re an independent author who creates your own deadlines, you may want to rethink some things… Your daily word-count goal is killing you (AKA “An odd place to begin this article, but trust me…”) I hear the collective gasp! coming from the peanut gallery, believe me. But, I’ve also seen you all on social media, constantly bemoaning that you’re not making your daily word-count quotas, as if something mystical happens when you reach 2000 words. It doesn’t. The only thing that happens is the number that used to read ...

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How to Become An Author

August 11, 2018, 11:20 am

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Every once in a while, an aspiring author reaches out to me to ask how I did it. How did I manage to accomplish the seemingly Herculean task of becoming a published author of a series of bestselling novels? While the voices of these authors are different, the sense of incredulity and exasperation are all the same. I can tell, through inference, that they’ve asked this question before of countless other authors. I suspect they’ve also received the very same answer I give them. But, it’s an answer they don’t like. To become an author, you write, write, then write some more. And when you feel as if you can’t write another single blessed word, write two instead. “Yes, yes,” ...

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How To Beat Writer’s Block in 30 Minutes

August 26, 2018, 12:04 pm

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Have you ever reached a point where the thought of opening Scrivener (or your document editor of choice) filled you with not only dread, but disgust? Have you ever stared at your laptop and silently uttered the words, “I just can’t even…”? It may not have had anything to do with lack of inspiration! It’s just that you couldn’t bring yourself to take another slog through your work-in-progress. If you’ve experienced any of these symptoms, I’m going to show you how to beat writer’s block in 30 minutes. The Problem It’s not unusual for our works-in-progress to consume multiple years of our lives. For example, I spent four years honing Necromancer Awakening, a book that went on to become an international ...

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Are You Still an Aspiring Writer?

January 13, 2019, 9:17 am

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You’ve been writing for days, months, years, perhaps decades. You have a few pages or paragraphs under your belt. Or, perhaps, you have partially finished manuscripts collecting dust somewhere. But, you just can’t bring yourself to use the word writer. Are you still an aspiring writer? If you answered yes, you’re not alone. You’re wrong. Misguided. Lacking a certain amount of self-confidence and a personal sense of authority and ownership. But, you’re not alone. Let’s talk about a few of the things that might be holding you back from using the W-word. Lack of Authority There’s this thing about new writers. They’re very tentative and they’ve yet to embrace any sense of authority over their writing and choice of career ...

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Do You Have a Dangling Participle?

May 18, 2019, 9:20 am

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For that matter, what is a dangling participle? Those of you who have followed the blog for a while know that I periodically gather questions people ask on Twitter with an eye toward writing a larger response here. Some questions simply require more space or finesse than 280 characters will allow. This isn’t one of them. But I’m going to do it anyway, because it has been too damned long since you friendly folks have heard from me! As you can see from the first sentence, the question of the day is, “What is a dangling participle?” First, what is a Participle? Before we can spot one dangerously dangling over…something that things are known to dangerously dangle over, it would be a ...

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To 1, or To 0: Translating Binary in Fiction

June 9, 2019, 10:05 am

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Binary in fiction is often laughable to an engineer like me. You’ve all seen the same scenes I have. A scientific research facility gets a signal from outer space. After several try/fail cycles, one of the junior scientists has a Eureka! moment. “Eureka! It’s binary!” the scientist says. [At least, I hope not. I really hope the writer does a better job than that. But, you get the idea.] Within hours (or even minutes), the engineer translates the entire message to perfection (with images and blueprints even!) and we understand the message being sent by the alien civilization. We can then march off and build our new teleportation device, space ship, poverty-fixing widget, or, perhaps, merely learn the meaning of ...

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A whole year!?

May 30, 2020, 9:54 am

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If you’re observant, and you take a close look at the dates on these blog articles, you’ll see something disturbing. It’s been nearly an entire year since my last post. So, what’s been going on that has kept me so busy? More importantly, what the heck is the deal with Necromancer Ascending!? The Long, Sad Story Okay, maybe that’s a little over dramatic. It’s neither long nor sad, really. In fact, quite the opposite. Sure, there are some ups and downs like everyone else, but overall it hasn’t been all that bad. Work (the day job) has been somewhat interesting, as it has for most of us. Prior to this whole global pandemic, I’d already been through a handful of reorganizations in ...

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Crash and Burn

July 14, 2020, 9:36 am

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You win some, you lose some, as the saying goes. Just as I was ramping back up on work on Necromancer Ascending, my ancient MSI laptop finally gave up the ghost. I’m talking brick territory. It had been giving me problems, on and off, for the last year or so. A few months ago, I disassembled it and gave it a thorough cleaning (I’ve worked on and maintained PCs for more than 30 years, so this wasn’t a risky activity for me). Then, over the 4th of July weekend, it went into a continuous reboot cycle and finally died. It doesn’t even POST. The slight burning smell isn’t a great sign either… So, what am I doing about it? Here’s ...

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Writing Without Being Offensive: A How-To Guide.

August 2, 2020, 11:41 am

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I saw a question about writing without being offensive in a Facebook writer’s group today and thought I’d share some of my thoughts here. I was a lot gentler in the group. The (paraphrased) question was: “How do you write a character who stands against Christianity without being offensive to readers?” For the purposes of this discussion, replace the word “Christianity” with any topic you think might be a land mine. Pro-Tip: You Can’t If you’re even remotely interested in achieving your full potential as a writer, then you need to get that shit out of your head right now. You need to write as if you don’t give a damn. You need to write as if your story and ...

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All titles $0.99 for limited time!

June 18, 2021, 7:15 am

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Beginning Friday, June 18 at 8am PDT, all of my book titles will be on sale for $0.99! This is a “Kindle Countdown” deal, so the prices will gradually begin to climb back to their original places. Mark your calendars and get ready for a steep discount!  “What order should I read them in?” you ask. Read on! Author’s Preferred Reading Order You know there are multiple ways to read many fantasy series, and The Mukthaar Chronicles is no different! But, I personally recommend the series be read in the following order: Necromancer Awakening: Book One of The Mukhtaar Chronicles. This was the book that started it all. It has consistently been in the top 100 Amazon bestseller lists around ...

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Still here!

August 6, 2022, 10:37 am

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The latest update on the progress of Necromancer Ascending.

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Twitter Blue? My Thoughts.

November 11, 2022, 10:04 am

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I have some comments on the whole Twitter Blue thing, but they’re going to take more space than Twitter will allow. I’ve used Twitter daily since around 2011/2012, and I’ve had an account since it launched. In that time I’ve seen a lot of strange things, including DMs from people claiming to be high-profile celebrities who eventually turned out to be nothing more than crooks with recycled confidence schemes.   On the other hand, I’ve seen it used as an amazing platform to launch careers. And I’m not talking about influencers…people famous for being famous. I’m talking about musicians, actors, comedians, writers…true creators. I include my own writing career in that number. I believe…no, I know that my books would not ...

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Twitter Blue suspended

November 12, 2022, 8:59 am

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Well THAT was short-lived… Remember my biggest point against selling blue checkmarks in my article yesterday? Yep… I don’t want to say that I told them so. But… I told them so. Account verification became a thing for a reason. The “person in charge” over there needs more savvy and less hubris. When a company as large and powerful as Ely Lilly loses billions in market cap over a single impersonated tweet, you’re probably going to have a bad day if you’re the cause. About Nat RussoNat Russo is the Amazon #1 Bestselling Fantasy author of Necromancer Awakening and Necromancer Falling. Nat was born in New York, raised in Arizona, and has lived just about everywhere in-between. He’s gone from pizza maker, ...

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Common Mistakes New Fiction Writers Make

May 17, 2023, 12:29 pm

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Welcome, aspiring fiction writers! Today, we’re embarking on an epic journey through the treacherous landscape of common mistakes that often plague newcomers in the world of storytelling. So fasten your seatbelts, grab your pen, and prepare to navigate the winding path of literary adventures. I’m Nat Russo, your friendly writing guide, ready to illuminate the dark corners and guide you to writerly success. Let’s see if we can avoid these common mistakes new fiction writers make! Tangled Beginnings: Weak Openings and Info Dumps Picture this: You open a book, eagerly anticipating a thrilling adventure, only to be greeted with a lackluster beginning that fails to ignite your imagination. Aspiring writers often stumble right out of the gate, their opening lines ...

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