This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. One randomly chosen winner via rafflecopter will win a $50 Amazon/BN.com gift card. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

As writers, our minds are filled with creativity and passion. We think about parts we can add to our story. We have awesome ideas to share on our blog. We can’t wait to sit down and write.

We want to always feel this enthusiasm but there’s one problem: inspiration doesn’t always strike. You will hit a block no matter how passionate you are. I don’t say this to be discouraging, becoming stuck happens to the best of us.

You have two options when you hit a block. The first option is to let the block bring you down. The second option is to view the situation as an opportunity to creatively work around the problem. In this post, we are going to explore the second option.

Writer’s block isn’t what people make it out to be. It’s really isn’t that bad! Trust me, once you sit down and begin to write, ideas will pop up left and right. You won’t even remember you had writer’s block in the first place.

In this post, I will share two tips to help wiggle you out of your creative rut.

Tip #1: Step Away

You may be frustrated, bored or tired. You need to allow your mind to breathe a bit. Go for a walk. Read a book. Take a nap. Do what calms you down and forget about writing for a moment. Take as much time as you need, you want to be fully recharged by the time you get back to your keyboard.

The mind has an amazing ability to quickly change moods. If you choose to remain frustrated, your creativity will be hindered. If you relax and clear your thoughts, you’ll find your mind has room for ideas again. Not the most sciency explanation, but it works! Be kind to yourself and avoid stress, your body and mind will thank you.

Tip #2: Close Everything But a Document and Timer

I’m sure you’ve heard about this before, but this tip is worth repeating over and over again. Why? Because it works like a charm. Close any app that has nothing to do with writing. Don’t leave a single app open. Procrastination will only strengthen your block. Now open your document and have a timer ready. Take a minute to commit to a set time. There are a couple of ways you can go about this.

Set a Timer For a Fixed Amount of Time

Set a time limit that you can commit to. Does an hour sound like too much? Set the timer for 30 minutes. Does 30 minutes sound like too much? Set it for 15. All that matters is you commit to a time. When this timer is active, you do nothing but write. Your writing can be about a story, what you had for lunch, or even the first thing that pops up in your head. It doesn’t matter what you write about. Keep writing until the timer stops.

At this point, you’ll find yourself wanting to write more. The more you write, the more engaged you become. Your ideas will come back to you. If not, take a break and repeat the process again.

Pomodoro Timer

You’ve probably heard of the Pomodoro technique. The idea is simple, your work block is 25 minutes long. Once you complete the work block, take a break for five to ten minutes. After the break, start the timer again. This works well for many people since 25 minutes is an easy commitment, and there’s a promised break at the end. Anybody can sit down for 25 minutes and write about what pops up in their head.

Writers find that this technique works fantastically when it comes to writer’s block. I encourage you to try it yourself. If you google ‘pomodoro timer’, you’ll find hundreds of results for a timer. Tomato Timer is a good start.

Conclusion

These two techniques can work as a dynamic duo to getting you out of your rut. I know it feels like you’re forcing yourself to write, but sometimes it’s necessary for getting your mind to tick. Sometimes your creative mind doesn’t want to move, so you have to push it a little to get the flow going. I hope you find these techniques as useful as I did. What are you waiting for? Set that timer and start writing!

After narrowly preventing the destruction of Cold City, PI Bellamy Vale needs a rest. Or rather, he needs a plain and simple vanilla case—no monsters or otherworldly creatures involved!

When foreign businessman Eli Smith shows up at his doorstep with a thick wallet and a request to find his missing sister, Vale doesn’t think twice before agreeing.

If he’d known body-hopping demons and smoke monsters came attached to this job, however, he might have.

Enjoy an Excerpt

The door slammed shut as something grabbed at me. And by “grabbed”, I mean “lifted me off the ground and rammed me into the nearest wall”.

The structure bent under the impact while a nightmare that would have fit in an old-school John Carpenter movie screamed at me. With my gas mask on, I never heard it coming.

Dazed, I glanced up and faced sharp, yellow-tainted teeth. They formed a circular pit of canines, ready to swallow my head whole. I pulled a knife from my boot and slashed the creep at the center of its mass. The fiend’s scream rose an octave as the cold steel struck home.

The creature dumped me back on the floor before dissipating into nothingness.

The attack sucked the air out of my lungs, and I spent the next few minutes coughing through the mask. I felt like kicking myself. I spent my first week here carving wards around the entire six-block area before going in for the first time. I should have known better than to cut one on this house’s front door and move on. I forgot the back door. That mistake left that damned poltergeist way too much room to attack.

The monster du jour was a ghost, an escapee from the realm of death—the Underworld, Hell, or whatever else you call the place people go to once they’re done with life. From what I knew, not everyone turns Casper in their afterlife. However, those who do become near-mindless creatures stuck in their own plane of existence. When they make it to our side of the border, they turn into full ectoplasmic savages.

The dead guy I stepped over near the open back doorway was proof enough of that. What was once an engineer working for the city now had his chest cavity cut down to the bone and his head severed from his body. Blood splatters all but drowned out the muted yellow of his shredded biohazard suit. Judging from the angle of what remained of his corpse, he was trying to flee the house when the poltergeist got him.

“Dammit,” I muttered as I tightened the straps on my gas mask. Whoever this engineer was, I was pretty sure he didn’t come in here alone, which meant I may have to explain what a six-foot PI in a surplus army jacket, a gas mask right out of the First World War and second-to-thirdhand leather gloves was doing in an area strictly reserved for city workers and engineers.

About the Author: Cristelle Comby was born and raised in the French-speaking area of Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where she still resides.

She attributes to her origins her ever-peaceful nature and her undying love for chocolate. She has a passion for art, which also includes an interest in drawing and acting.

She is the author of the Neve & Egan Cases series, which features an unlikely duo of private detectives in London: Ashford Egan, a blind History professor, and Alexandra Neve, one of his students.

Currently, she is hard at work on her Urban Fantasy series Vale Investigation which chronicles the exploits of Death’s only envoy on Earth, PI Bellamy Vale, in the fictitious town of Cold City, USA.

Buy the book at Amazon.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Of course, we’re not all named Picasso, and most of us skipped the Photoshop-101 class. But, in this day and age, it’s really easy to hire a professional to do your cover art. Yes, it can be pricey, but this is one thing you shouldn’t skimp on, and here’s why:

Your cover is your book’s first impression. That’s the cold hard truth of it all. Most readers do judge a book by its cover. It doesn’t matter if the interior is amazing, and your story is the best one that’s ever been told. If the exterior is bad and cheap-looking, readers simply won’t pick it up.

There’s more to it than art. Yes the cover has to be nice and pleasing on the eye, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Your cover is a filter that should only let in readers who’ll enjoy the story and leave a positive review. Designing the right cover is all about demographics, market research and psychology and it requires professional skills.

It broadens your horizons. For my latest novel, Hostile Takeover, I turned to 99Design.com which is like the designers’ Craig’s List. My job description was very short: a little bit about the genre of the book, the full summary and a few pictures of random book covers I like. Mostly, I encouraged designers to be creative and to follow their inspiration.

Seeing what the artists came up with—how they perceived my story and how it inspired them—was the most interesting experience. The designs were very varied and far exceeded my expectation.

Some of the entries.

The final cover, by Spanish designer Miguel A. Ereza.

Yes, it costs money to get a professional cover. But think of all the time you invested in your story, all the hours you put in. Would you really gift-wrap your hard work in cheap newspaper?

P.I. Bellamy Vale isn’t your everyday investigator. Moonlighting as Death’s earth-bound envoy, he specializes in the weird, wacky, and slightly unhinged.

When a mysterious beast savagely mauls random residents of Cold City, the police assume that these are the killings of a rogue wolf. But experienced private investigator, Bellamy Vale, is unconvinced.

Ordered by Death herself to investigate, Vale has no choice but to obey, for his boss is not someone to disappoint—if he wants to keep breathing, that is.

With friend and computer hacker Zian, nosy journalist Candice Kennedy, and homicide sergeant Melanie Ramirez by his side, Vale has no choice but to end the killings or face the wrath of the demon who holds his life in her hands.

Enjoy an Excerpt

I was having a bad day.

The ugly thug facing me readied himself for the next swing. “What did you say, bastard?” His red-splattered knuckles were ready for the next round; my body wasn’t.

“I’m haffin a fah fay,” I managed to repeat through a mouthful of saliva and blood.

That made Julian Ragazzo, former welterweight boxing champ and top bodyguard to the city’s prime Italian Mafia family, smile. His wet beard glistened with sweat beads around stained teeth. Glad one of us was happy.

I took stock of the damage Ragazzo had already done. Broken nose, check. Split lip, check. Swollen eye, check. Broken rib, double check, and the list went on and on. It could have been worse. The injuries, though painful, weren’t enough to put me in the hospital. Sure, I’d hurt for a week or four, but I’d live to tell the tale outside of a body cast. I knew that, and Ragazzo did, too. This was a game we’d both played before … not that I’d gotten any better at it.

I caught a reflection of myself in the glossy surface of a cabinet door. My messy mop of brown locks was matted with blood on one side and the five o’clock shadow had a hard time concealing a fast-bruising chin. One eye was swollen shut and the other had a pale blue, haunted orb dancing amidst a sea of red veins. I was a mess, and not a hot one.

I closed my good eye and waited for the next blow. The bodyguard didn’t disappoint. A second later, he delivered a power punch and I saw stars. It didn’t help that I was tied to a chair and my already sore shoulders screamed in protest at the added strain. In a noise that only I could hear, my body cried out, ‘How in all the hells was this part of the plan?’ Fair question—it wasn’t.

In truth, there may have been a few glitches here and there. Like those two extra guards at the office building’s back entrance, plus that wrong turn I took on the fourteenth floor. Yeah, okay … the plan was just as screwed as I was.

Ragazzo followed up his haymaker with another kick in the guts. It would have ripped a scream out of me if I’d had any breath left for it. Instead, my lungs just took in short, choppy gasps I couldn’t control.

“Well, well, well … look what the cat dragged in,” taunted an Italian-lilted voice.

I recognized the lazy drawl and opened my good eye to confirm my suspicions. Sure enough, Alonzo Vitorini, Cold City’s resident wannabe kingpin, stood near the entrance in a dark-green pinstriped suit. Shit, looking at his ugly get-up hurt worse than any of Ragazzo’s blows.

Vitorini sauntered into the room, smiling as he noticed my stare. “Like the suit?” he asked, doing a little pirouette to show off this walking insult to fashion.

I wasn’t going to reply, but the second my eye caught sight of the finishing touch, a pair of black-and-white spectator shoes, my mouth kicked into gear on its own.

“Al Capone called,” I wheezed out. “He wants his brogues back.”

Vitorini laughed, the corners of his muddy-green eyes wrinkling. Not sure if he was laughing at the crack or the fact that he was going to kill me for it in another minute or two.

About the Author: Cristelle Comby was born and raised in the French-speaking area of Switzerland, in Greater Geneva, where she still resides.

She attributes to her origins her ever-peaceful nature and her undying love for chocolate. She has a passion for art, which also includes an interest in drawing and acting.

She is the author of the Neve & Egan Cases series, which features an unlikely duo of private detectives in London: Ashford Egan, a blind History professor, and Alexandra Neve, one of his students.

Currently, she is hard at work on her Urban Fantasy series Vale Investigation which chronicles the exploits of Death’s only envoy on Earth, PI Bellamy Vale, in the fictitious town of Cold City, USA.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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