This is one of my favorite writing books. Although not a book teaching the rules of grammar, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones is filled with tips, exercises and ideas to help strengthen, focus and improve your writing. A must read for anyone who writes and loves words. I wanted to add a link to Amazon, but the CAPTCHA wouldn't let me (so just Google it; it's hugely popular).

I just completed a 189 page manuscript about life in Israel. The book deals with illegal immigrants and the growing tide of africans within Israel. The entire book is a collection of short stories so it can be reviewed story by story. I would like someone to take a look at the manuscript please. It has been edited 10 times already. Email me

Having just uploaded the second corrected ms of War on the Margins to Amazon's Kindle (which I won't buy myself unless the price drops below $200), I would like to spare other writers the mind-numbing and eye-irritating process of going over your entire ms and redoing it.

Kindle accepts .html files. This file format does not accept "curly" (you know, directional) quotation marks, but only straight up-and-down ones that look the same on the left side as on the right side. This, fortunately, can be corrected with a couple of simple "find-and-replace" actions.

If, like me, you think double spacing between lines of dialogue and between unrelated paragraphs makes the book read better, it DOESN'T in Kindl-ese. It looks AWFUL (I have this on authority from readers and two reviewers who actually took a star off my rating for the way the book looked on Kindle). Consider writing the first ms with plain-vanilla spacing, uploading it to Kindle as an .html, and then going wild with your spacing and typography for the dead-tree edition.

I am told that there is an entirely different set of rules for .mobi publication, but I can't deal with it right now...

Libby Cone, author of War on the Margins: A Novel