Some country songs are short stories with plot twists and character arcs.

One of the many writing lessons I’ve learned from “The Voice” is an appreciation for country music. Voice coach Blake Shelton is always on the hunt for country music “storytellers.”

Shelton’s wife Miranda Lambert has a song she co-wrote with Travis Howard that follows a structure we fiction writers admire greatly. You’ll see “Famous in a Small Town,”  – click on the link if you can’t see the video embedded above –  has a beginning, a middle and a twist or two that turns the song into a short story worthy of O. Henry.

Before we begin scroll back up and listen to the song, if you haven’t yet.

Beginning

The story question is stated: is some fame, the kind with telephoto lenses, is better than other kinds of fame? Is it better to be a big fish in a small pond or a big fish in a big pond?

I’m guessing the young female narrator had been the subject of some small-town gossip and judgmental attitudes. I’m also guessing it stung.

After the theme is stated, the young female narrator says she dreamed of becoming Telephoto Lens famous by having gone to Nashville to become a star. We notice that she uses the past tense.

Twist #1

She returned home and ended up on the front page of the local paper by bagging the first buck of the deer season. What’s not in the song is that she also probably received a lot of compliments and favorable attention for her hunting prowess. Maybe being noticed, after having been a little fish in a big sea of Nashville hopefuls, is a refreshing experience?

Middle

The chorus and the bit about Tyler and Casey breaking up both give us a taste of small town life in which everyone knows everyone else and is happy to believe the most sensational version of their stories.

Twist #2

Our narrator and would-be Nashville star isn’t being arch or flip or dismissive when she talks to her friend, perhaps her long-time BFF. She’s not giving up, but moving on. Or, in this case, moving back by embracing her status as being the subject of gossip.

Denouement

The narrator may have been stung by talk around town, which may have made Nashville-type fame more appealing before, but no more. She’s in the mood to shake things up and get tongues wagging, through the rather innocent but low-hanging fruit of wardrobe choices.

The final line and theme is “Everybody dies famous in a small town.”

Mystery author Sasscer Hill and Tony Baughman of WKSX-FM set up for a radio interview at the Aiken Trials. Photo by Rhonda Lane

You’re an author at an event. You see someone wearing a headset, perhaps with a microphone, sitting off to the side with some boxy electronic equipment with dials or slides.

That person may be a radio announcer, especially if he or she has media credentials. He or she may “doing a remote broadcast” and wondering how to fill the hour or so. He or she might be looking for someone to talk to.

That someone could be you.

That’s exactly what happened when I was with my friends Sasscer Hill and Polly Iyer at the Aiken Trials, sort of a dress rehearsal for the track for young race horses. We were helping Sasscer set up her table to sign her racing mysteries when I spotted Tony Boughman of WKSX-FM with his table of equipment and introduced myself when he wasn’t talking on the air.

I used to work in both radio and television. In college, I spun middle-of-the-road music as a DJ at my campus station and later wrote advertising copy, aka radio commercials, for the town’s commercial radio station. Back at WKYT-TV and ESPN, I worked on live broadcasts of sporting events in various capacities, from computer graphics to dragging cables along behind sidelines camera operators. Despite the march from analog to digital equipment, I recognize pro equipment when I see it, as well as media credentials.

Anyway, the announcer Tony and I chatted about why I was there, hanging out with my friend the horse racing mystery writer who’d just moved to Aiken, and he told me to send her over.

Wait until the person isn’t talking to approach

If they’re talking, they’re on the air. You don’t want to interrupt. If the announcer isn’t talking and it’s radio, a song or commercials or other programming could be playing from the studio. That’s a good time to say “hi.”

Ask what station they’re from

This is mostly an ice-breaker. I probably shouldn’t tell you what I said: “Hey, are you podcasting? Or is this real radio?” Yikes! What was I thinking? In an effort to repair my karma, podcasting is “new” radio. Perhaps you’d be better off asking, “What station are you from?” or “Are you local?”

Have a copy of your book ready

Even though it’s for radio and no one will see anything as the interview airs, have a copy of your book ready. In hindsight, we should have set up Sasscer’s book so that passers by could see it during the interview. In fairness, I should state that I grabbed that photo while they were setting up for the interview.

Take photos

You probably can’t take photos of yourself, but you should enlist someone to do so. After all, you’ve probably got a website or a Facebook page.

If you can afford it, offer them a copy of your book afterward.

If not, give them a bookmark or a card with your website information, especially if you can offer a free chapter.

Another idea is buy the announcer a bottle of water, put it near the announcer, waggle your fingers and smile and nod so he/she knows it’s from you. Try to make sure you don’t put the bottle with condensation on it on or near the radio equipment. When you talk a lot, your mouth gets dry. Odds are, he or she has a bottle of water with them already but giving them a bottle is a nice gesture and inexpensive.

Can you think of other good ideas to add? Have I forgotten any important points to remember? Feel free to post them below.

This is not Joel.

If you’re having technical trouble with your blog, have you thought about hiring a hiring a blog technical support person?

True confessions time: I don’t do every bit of the work on my blogs.

Sure, I write posts, re-size photos, hunt up stories and videos, update plug-ins, back up the blog – all the day2day stuff that WordPress makes easy once you get used to using it.

As for the behind-the scenes, under-the-hood tech stuff, the “alphabet soup,” like FTP, HTML, CSS?

Fugeddabouddit! I email Joel, the Blog Tech Guy.

Disclaimer time — My links to Joel’s website aren’t affiliate links. I don’t get money or anything but good vibes from recommending him if you hire him and he helps you. Now, back to our story …

If you want to cut costs and work with WordPress yourself, hiring a blog tech person is a great alternative to a web designer.

Granted, I do know how to do some of that stuff. It’s not pretty. My ability to code HTML doesn’t even rise to the See Spot Run level

How I got here from there

I took both of Yaro Starak’s blogging courses, the now-defunct Blog Mastermind and the early version of “Become a Blogger” which he now teaches with Gideon Shalwick and BM alumnus Leslie Samuel.

From the early days when I started BM, Yaro kept telling us not to spend too much time setting up our blogs, that we should outsource.

I remember thinking, “What’s the point of learning how to do this stuff if we pay someone to do the work?” Besides, I wanted to be able to do that stuff myself so I could save money. So, I went the do-it-yourself route for a while.

I spent some time dizzy from the spiral of the learning curve. I realized why people used to call learning a computer program via trial-and-error “hacking.”

Anyway, I gave up and emailed Joel, who also answers questions in Yaro’s blog teaching forums.

What takes me hours, even days, takes Joel twenty minutes tops. (Okay. I didn’t time him, but he’s fast.) He even got The Horsey Set Net out of a jam when I screwed things up with a plug-in I’d installed.  I’d scrambled the code somehow. Oops.

See what I mean? You might as well get the tech right the first time.

That’s why he set up this site in its current incarnation, even though I could have just deployed Fantastico from my web host’s control panel … I can see your eyes glazing.

How Joel helped with this site

Originally, I’d used a website template for my author website here, but I couldn’t update or customize the site without doing FTP (file transfer protocol) or fiddling with the code, both of which give me the shakes and heartburn.

For the first three years of its existence, I couldn’t even figure out how to add a link here on this blog to The Horsey Set Net.

WordPress, a blogging platform, makes updating a website easy for Digital Doofuses like me.

“Maybe I don’t want to use your guy, Rhonda?”

No problem. Other blog tech people are out there. Ask around. Most writers I know just hire a designer or ask a tech-savvy relative. I don’t know many others who use a blog tech freelancer instead of a designer.

I know a guy who used to periodically offer a free blog setup for new blogs, but he’s shifted his business more toward writing, so I think he’s moved on. I don’t even see his blog set-up package anymore. Oh, well. C’est la vie.

Back in my blogger skool days, in addition to Joel, my teacher Yaro recommended finding freelancers at elance or Hire My Mom. I also see a new site ODesk. I don’t know anything about it, but it looks promising.

“Hire someone? I can’t even afford the gopher in the photo!”

Well, time is a commodity, too. WordPress and the other blogging platforms offer both text and video tutorials. Afterward, you’ll have a new skill.

Realize going in that there could be blood, sweat, tears, toil and swearing, but you’ll feel mighty afterward.

Also, keep in mind that the best thing you can do when you feel stuck is to walk away from the keyboard for a while. (See the above photo. )

Besides, the more you know how to do, the farther your dollar will stretch when you finally throw in the mouse and email Joel.

Do you have a blog support person to recommend? Or want to give your web designer a shoutout? Or just have a question or comment? Feel free to comment below. Thanks!

I spent part of Election Day 2012 in a hospital waiting room. I’m okay, but doctors monitor my blood once a month to make sure I remain that way. My blood tests aren’t the usual “tap, slap, off ya go” affairs. I have to wait a while for an IV nurse, so I always take a book.

On election day, I sat on the aisle when a little family rolled up. A teenage girl in a wheelchair with her leg in a cast, a boy about 10 years old and a middle-aged woman wearing a Muslim headscarf scanned the area for a spot to sit together.

I shifted a couple of seats toward the wall from my aisle seat. That left two seats in a makeshift conversation cluster for them. I flashed a “here ya go” gesture. They sat next to me. Problem solved.

Different accents often catch my ear. The woman’s English sounded tentative as if she needed to translate inside her mind before she spoke. The boy and girl chattered away in fast American speech. I tried not to eavesdrop, but they were so close. They sounded as if they had a fun day planned, although they were new to this whole outpatient stuff. I think I added a couple of cordially supportive comments. After all, I’m an old hand at doctor doings.

I usually surprise northerners by chiming in on their conversations, so this exchange, too, ended with the usual polite discomfort. I made an exaggerated sheepish face straight out of vaudeville, muttered, “Oops. Sorry. I’ll mind my own business,” and returned to my book. They resumed their conversations. Sort of. That’s when I noticed the woman had a book open, too.

Her small pocket-sized book had a plain cover and all the text appeared to be Arabic. Or Farsi.

A nurse called the girl for her outpatient procedure. After she left, the woman turned to me. “Have you voted yet?” she said.

I have to admit, I was a little surprised when she spoke to me. “Not yet. My husband asked me to wait until he gets home from work so we can go together. That’s sort of our thing.”

With a smile, she tilted her head toward the boy and said, “He wanted to go first thing this morning. He was so disappointed, though, with the polls. He thought we should vote in the White House.”

We both smiled and nodded in one of those “kids say the darnedest things” moments. Then, I had a memory flash of news footage of Iraqi women with purple thumbs raised to celebrate  voting. That’s when an idea sparked.

“He’s got a point,” I said with a bit of aHA moment awe. “Voting should include more ceremony and ritual. It IS a big deal, and we should celebrate it more.”

The girl returned, and family day resumed. Her mom and I nodded cursory farewells, almost as if we hadn’t shared a moment, so I returned to my book. Except she’d planted a thought.

Why don’t we celebrate voting more?

We take voting for granted. Up here in Connecticut, we vote – at least in my town – in elementary schools closed for the day. We arrive down a driveway lined with political signs only to run a gantlet of pamphlet-bearing volunteers. Inside, poll workers are pleasant, even if they’ve been there since the 6 am opening. We arrive, show ID. Get in, get out. Bada bing, bada boom.

Granted, there’s much appeal to getting it over with and returning to normal life.

But we celebrate everything else. Minor holidays. Championship athletic events. The Oscars. Why not Election Day? I have to admit that the relentless negative ads batter my enthusiasm for the process.  We get enmeshed in the whole partisan politics clash.

For the first time, I noticed children much more excited about the election than the adults, even the middle-aged woman obviously born in the Middle East. When my husband and I went to vote, a father and son showed up behind us. The son wanted an “I voted” sticker, but the polling place was out. The boy left disappointed, as if he’d been dreaming of that toy for weeks but the store was out of stock.

Are children naive? Or do they have the right idea?

Self-confidence, projection, belief in the material, presentation and even storytelling. It’s all there.

The Blind Auditions/Manuscript Submission Pile/The Pitch

At first, it’s only about The Voice. The four coaches sit with their backs to the stage and just listen to the music. They don’t know what the singer looks like. They may even know the singer already but don’t recognize the person’s voice, as with Christina Aguilera and fellow former Mousketeer Tony Lucca in Season 2.

Granted, singers at the Blind Audition stage have received invitations, so they’ve been through a screening process. Same with the Submission Pile or the ebook listings, if you’ve gone indie and are out in the marketplace.  All that really matters to any decision maker – whether they’re judges or buyers — at this point is the Voice/the story.

Marketability isn’t part of the question – yet.

The critiques

The coaches, after hitting the “I WANT YOU” button – or not – have a chance to explain why or why not.

Some publishing gatekeepers do take time to comment, but most are so swamped with manuscripts that they don’t have the time or the energy.

That said, which one of the following comments do you think is from THE VOICE? And which do you think is from agent/editor rejection letters?

• “You were comfortable up there.”
• “You were pitchy.”
• “Not my thing.”
• “Your voice is strong, and I want more.”
• “This needs more work.”

The Battle Rounds/The Market Place Lite

Two singers perform a short duet which is less about the material and more about the duel. The coaches pick the winner, usually the one with the best stage presence and performs the song the best.

Two manuscripts slip over the transom. A two-manuscript day would be remarkable for overwhelmed publishing screeners, but go along with me here so we can keep the metaphor afloat. They often decide on the basis of the title and the first page alone. Does it grab interest?

Actually, if this were THE VOICE, the coach would have to pick one to save, even if neither performance is up to par. Agents-and-editors? They can reject all.

Season 2 cast members Tony Vincent and Justin Hopkins duke it out for Coach CeeLo Green’s nod, but pay attention to the critiques. Click on the link above for the video. Apologies if and when NBC takes it down.

Decision makers

The Voice coaches, when they have to choose one singer over the other, say find themselves in a pickle. They do show regret and remorse and some affection for the singers on their teams. However, one has reportedly picked a team winner in advance and strategically pitted that singer against the others so that chosen one would remain standing at the end. Some of the coaches look toward a singer’s future versatility in this malleable period before Brands have formed.

The Live Shows/The MarketPlace

The public decides with votes and purchases. In publishing, Likes and Follows are nice but what counts are the purchases. Money talks.

Actually, pretty much like those final episodes of The Voice.

The Voice as teaching tool

What the judges say to their teams can apply to writers. A singer in the moment with the song and working the stage can make a favorable impression. It’s possible to win an audience, but lose the judges. Or vice versa. Details and a big picture view matter.

It all shows up in The Voice — and on the page.

Have you learned anything helpful from reality TV? Feel free to tell us in the Comments section below.

Photo courtesy Barbara Liskow. From the SinCNE "Reads Across New England" event

That first author reading outside of a workshop atmosphere is daunting. According to the Self Help Collective, the fear of public speaking is second only to the fear of flying.

My first such reading was in March 2012 at a New England Sisters in Crime event for the state of Connecticut. I read the first few pages of my work-in-progress, along with about a dozen published and yet-to-be-published authors.

I got by with a little help from my friends, and I don’t mean Mr. Makers Mark or Ms. Xanax. Here are some tips from fellow members of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America and Romance Writers of America. Maybe these tips will help you, too.

1. Select the passage you’ll read. Avoid scenes with dialogue in accents you know you can’t manage. Try to pick something that ends on a hook – a story question or a surprise.

2. From author Steve Liskow: Edit the material to facilitate reading. If you stumble repeatedly over a word or sentence, delete or re-work it.

3. This tip comes from author and public speaking coach Sarah Humphreys: Lie down on your back on the floor to hear what your voice sounds like as it comes up from your diaphragm.

4. When you inhale, try to suck in air all the way down to your stomach. Courtesy every yoga teacher I’ve ever had.

5. Practice while standing. Practice projecting. Yes, practice reading aloud.

6. Rehearse, edit, rehearse. A couple of times a day. Practice works, which is why it’s how you get to Carnegie Hall.

7. Read more slowly than you feel you should. Your nerves will want you to rush.

8. Write cues on your pages. Maybe a “thank you” to the previous speaker or the toss to the next. Or even pauses while reading.

9. Wear clothes that boost your confidence. Lucky jewelry. Lucky socks.

10. Eye contact. For a reading, IMO, the material is more important. You don’t want your eye to skip over words. Yet, you want to make occasional eye contact with someone in the audience and hold it. Your voice will sound stronger. Another tip from Sara Humphreys.

11. If you’re reading from a published book, I suggest you still print out the passage you want to read, if for no other reason than you can control the size of the font/typeface. Still, if you have a book, make sure the audience can see your book cover while you read. You could also have a printout of your book cover on the front of the folder of your pages for the reading.

12. Have fun. We’re entertainers. Or educators. We all know that best of the latter are both. “Fun” is contagious and magnetic.

Have I left out anything? Do you have a favorite tip that you’d like to add? Please feel free to add it to the Comments section below.

Here are a few easy blogging tips that don’t take a lot of tech work. They’re easy-peasy. Maybe one of these can help you?

Blog posts aren’t just for the day

You’ve heard all the horror stories about how once something gets on the Internet, it’s there forever? Scary, huh?

Why not use that power to your advantage? Make a resource for people. Especially you guys who’ve been blogging on a daily basis – bless you – for years?

Blog posts accumulate onto a website, like savings. See? Positive!

One thing I enjoy is that I can go back and change things after I’ve posted them. We get to add new information, correct mistakes or those typos that hide until the text has gone public.

Posts I wrote three years ago still receive hits and comments. If someone who isn’t a spammer takes the time to leave me a comment on an old post, I respond with a “thanks,” if nothing else.

Use your Post Tags

Over in that box that says “Post Tags,” list everything the blog post is about. Think like someone who might ask a question that could bring up your blog in a search engine.

Back when I first started blogging, I’d heard that Google only tolerated about six or seven. I’ve since used eight or ten. I haven’t been dragged off to Blogger’s Prison yet.

Those Post Tags are how we determine how our blog posts are indexed for the web.

IMO, Tags are Keywords.

And, BTW, although it’s time-consuming, if you have a blog post that people might find helpful, you can go back and add your Tags.

Use your title tags and Permalinks

Okay, this one’s a bit techy. The thing is, I always feel bad for bloggers whose blog post titles read as a post number.

Those bloggers are missing a chance at some Search Engine Optimization mojo. SEO is how you position your blog so the search engines can find you.  Tags and Titles help readers find your site.

Be aware of RSS feed timing

Your email subscribers will get the announcement a post is up either the night you publish it or — entirely possible — the day after.

Think about RSS feeders and readers as working like a Yahoo email listserv. If you have timely information, posting it the night before might be too late.

Try for “timely” stories

Back when I worked in news, we always sought a local angle to an national story. Who locally might have a connection to what’s making headlines in state or national news? Likewise, we’d look toward seasons and events.

Readers are curious about big stories and events. Some events, like holidays, are cultural touchstones that everyone wants to know about or salute.

If you can fit what people are interested in reading into your blog – and set up your Tags and Titles so your articles can be found – you can attract more readers.

Over on The Horsey Set Net, the WAR HORSE movie, Pottermania and the Kentucky Derby have been very, very good to me.

Be helpful

When you think about what people might want to know about a topic, think about what you know that you can share with people.

Again, get those Tags and Titles working for you so people can find that information you’re sharing.  You can even write the Tag as a question: “How to ___ .”

Be generous

We all love to link to our friends’ blogs in the Blogroll, but if you really want to do them a solid, link to them within the text of your blog post.

Especially helpful are links to specific blog posts, not just links to the URL of the blog itself. The links go into the post in the Comments section.

I realize that can be difficult to do, especially when you have a niche interest blog. That said, I don’t sit in a miff when people don’t link to my blog. They have a specific readership to entertain, as do I.

Link within

Guess what? It’s okay to link to your own past articles. Actually, Google digs it. Sometimes, people like to read more about a topic, so you’re also helping your readers by making additional reading convenient.

Have fun

If you approach blogging as drudgery, then it’ll show. So don’t blog daily if it grinds you down.

No matter how often you blog, find what you love about a topic and focus on that.

When I first started blogging, I used to be confused by the difference between a blog’s “tags” and “categories.”

What did those words even mean? How would I use them? Couldn’t I just leave them blank?

So, let’s talk about what they are and ways we  can use them.

Post Tags

What they are – the Dick-and-Jane version

Imagine the World Wide Web (the WWW in a website’s URL), as a library.

You write your “book” (er, blog post.) Then, you list what all it’s about so library patrons who can’t think of the title will know how to find it.

Those words in the list go into that form down in the box that says “Post Tags.”

That’s how people will find your article with their web browsers.

Why WordPress doesn’t call Tags “keywords,” I’ll never know. Because that’s what they are. Keywords.

How I use “post tags”

As you can imagine, the “library” that’s the World Wide Web has a staggering  of blog posts with at least one post tag, aka tag, of “how to blog.”

Additional words in those tags drill down through the info. Scroll around and see what tags I used.

For one thing, I try to think like someone looking for the information. Some people do web searches by typing questions, so I try to think, “If I were looking for this, how might I ask?” In it goes as a Post Tag.

If I hit Publish, then think of more? I can come back to “Edit” the post and add more tags. I try not to use more than ten.

Kinda like “keywords.”

Categories

What They Are – Dick-and-Jane Return

Now, your blog is a book with organizer tabs. What you’d write on those organizer tabs dividing sections of your book (er, blog) are the Categories.

Key way to remember:

Tags are index words for outsiders and web browsers. They’re also keywords.
Categories are like file folder tabs, internal to your blog.

How I use Categories

Here’s a tip No One Ever Tells You about Categories on your blog. In theory, you can use as many as you want.

What really happens, though, is that your number of categories is limited by the blog theme/skin/layout you choose.

A prime example is the theme/layout I chose for The Horsey Set Net.

The free WordPress theme I found and used is called Amazing Grace. I chose it because I liked rotating images on the banner. I also liked the colors, the green and the orange.

So, I didn’t realize that by using Amazing Grace, I’d limited myself to four Categories because of the space allotted for them in the banner across the top.

In other words, I had only four headings (file folders) under which to file my blog posts.

I found out you can edit your Categories, thank goodness. I ditched the Welcome category. The welcome felt implied anyway. Plus, how many Welcomes would does a blogger write anyway? See what I mean.

So, my About page became what amounted to my Welcome page. I knew I’d be writing travel pieces, informative articles, some reviews and some editorials.

And, because that little display window for all those Categories is short, I needed short words for the Category names.

I came up with Articles, News, Travel and Opinion. Umbrella words that give me lots of flexibility.

As I first wrote this post in October 2011, the theme/layout/skin for this blog is a Woo Theme called Papercut, which has a lot more space for Categories. Yet, I learned my lesson, even though I wanted clever names for them.

My take-home lesson learned?

Short category names work best. Besides, with a blog platform driving the site? We can edit and fine tune as we go. Even better.

Photo by tome 221 of stock.xchng

Any questions? Comments? Better yet, something you’d like to add? How have you used Tags and Categories? Please feel free to chime in below in the Reply section.