The Proof is in the Proofing

It’s one of the less fun, to say the least, parts of writing, even for someone like me who loves to write. But proofreading matters, no matter what type of writing you do.  If you’re a lawyer, it’s hard to make a good impression on clients, the court, or other attorneys you work with (or against) if you send documents with typos.  If you write fiction, nothing is more distracting to a reader, or more likely to alienate a potential publisher, than grammatical mistakes or spelling errors.  We’d all like to think our plots or characters or arguments are so compelling that the reader will soldier on despite being yanked out of the narrative by errors in spelling, format, or grammar.  But why take the chance?  And why would you want your reader – whether a book purchaser, judge, or business colleague – to stop in the middle of what you wrote to wonder whether a comma really belongs there or why that word looks wrong?

Ironically, the ease of revising documents today compared to the days of typewriters and photocopiers actually seems to make producing perfect text harder.  It’s possible via email and word processing and electronic publishing to edit documents down to the very last second, and so we do it.  Which makes it more likely we’ll miss errors.  Below are my top eight tips for producing perfect copy. You won’t be able to use all of them all the time.  But if you apply a few, chances are your finished work will be much closer to perfect.

(1) Give yourself time.  If it’s at all possible, aim to finish your brief, story, or statement the evening before it’s due so you can look at it fresh in the morning.  It’s amazing what will jump out at you.  If that’s not possible, and often it’s not these days, find a way to set the document aside for at least an hour, during which time you should do something completely unrelated, before the last read through. 

(2) Print and print preview.  At least once when your document is close to final, print it and review it on paper.  When you make final edits, print at least the pages you’ve changed, set them aside for a few minutes, then look one last time.  And before you email or submit any document, use the print preview feature on your word processor to eyeball the entire document.  Check for formatting aspects such as margins, paragraph indents, and spacing.  Nothing is more frustrating than slaving over a 10 or 20-page manuscript, making a last minor change, and not realizing it threw your formatting off so that suddenly there’s a half a blank page in the middle, or the font shrunk to 8 point on page three.  The reader sees this major problem and thinks you never bothered even to glance at the work before you sent it.  A quick review with print preview ensures your document looks good overall.

(3) Read aloud.  Reading a document aloud helps you get a fresh look and spot mistakes.  I often read my outgoing emails aloud before I send.  (This also helps me recognize if the tone of the email is other than what I intended.)  For longer documents, or shorter turn around times, try just reading aloud the areas you’re struggling with or the areas to which you made your last changes.

 (4) Use a ruler.  If you’ve rewritten a document several times and your eyes are blurring, try placing a ruler under each line of text as you read.  This helps you focus on one line at a time and makes it easier to spot mistakes.

(5) Read backwards.  Reading backwards won’t help you with grammar, but it will help you spot spelling errors and spacing issues like th is one.  Reading forwards, your mind tends to fill in the blanks and correct errors because, as hard as you try, your brain focuses on the content, not the actual words.  Reading backwards short-circuits that.  This approach obviously is not for entire novels or even 25-page briefs.  It can be very effective, however, for a short document that you absolutely need to be perfect.

(6) Share the work.  Ask a clerk, secretary, or colleague who has never reviewed your document before to read it.  Even if the person you ask is not a fantastic proofreader, he or she will almost certainly spot errors you read right through because you know the writing so well.  (If you’re a lawyer, you may wonder, why not let the client or your supervising partner do that – she or he is going to read the document anyway.  Yes, but do you really expect your client or supervisor to act as your assistant and correct your mistakes?  Really?)

(7) Aim for perfection.  Make it your goal to provide a story or brief or memo that’s free from all errors.  Is that realistic?  Probably not, especially if you are working on an 85,000 word novel.  But if you aim for a perfect document, the odds are, at worst, you will miss a few typos.  If you mentally shrug your shoulders and decide that typing “where” instead of “wear” or “therefore” instead of “therefor” really doesn’t matter, it’s likely you’ll produce work with many errors.  (Homonyms – words that sound the same but are spelled differently like “where” and “wear” – are the main reason you can’t rely on your word processor’s spell checker alone for proofreading.) 

(8) Start well and end well.  In a very long document, particularly if you need to finish within a short time period, you may not be able to proof the entire document one last time after your final changes and before calling it finished.  So, at the very least, make your first page and last page perfect.  Read them aloud, read them backwards, read them with a ruler to be sure those pages shine.  Why?  The beginning of a document provides the reader’s first impression, and the end of the document will be most likely to be remembered.  Make your first and last impressions good ones.

Now, if there are typos in the above, I’m going to be really embarrassed.

Lisa M. Lilly is an attorney and author of Kindle occult bestseller THE AWAKENING, short story collection THE TOWER FORMERLY SEARS AND TWO OTHER TALES OF URBAN HORROR, and numerous poems, short stories, and articles.  

Follow her on Twitter:  @lisamlilly

Check out The Awakening on Amazon:  http://amzn.to/pFCcN6

iPhones and the Art of Writing Simply

Consider this sentence:

    In order to make a determination regarding whether negotiations should be entered into at this point in time, an evaluation of benefits and detriments was made.  

         If your brain turned off after the fourth or fifth word, it’s not because you’re not a lawyer.  Or, if you are a lawyer, it’s not because you’re not a smart lawyer.  It’s because it’s a terrible sentence.  Try this one instead:

To decide whether to negotiate now, we weighed the pluses and minuses. 

         The second sentence says the same thing as the first, but using 12 words instead of 26.  And the 12 words are simpler and clearer.  This applies to other types of writing too.  Compare my poorly-written version of a sentence from Joy Fielding’s The Wild Zone (see page 113 of Pocket Books paperback edition) to the real thing:

    At that very moment, she made an identification of the vehicle as the automobile she’d been followed by the night before, which vehicle she’d made the assumption was owned by the detective who had been hired by her husband.

    She’d recognized the car immediately as the one that had tailed her the night before, the one she’d assumed belonged to a detective hired by her husband.   

In both pairs of examples, the second sentence is easier to understand and more likely to keep the reader’s attention.  That matters to me no matter what I’m writing.  In law or for business, I usually write to explain something to someone – whether it’s a client, a colleague or a judge – or to persuade someone to see things my way.  It’s harder to do either if I make the reader struggle to understand me or, worse yet, to stay awake.  When I write fiction, obviously I want and need to capture and keep the reader’s attention.  Excessive words bog down a story and can bury the even most exciting plot twists and characters.

Simplifying my writing also allows me to cover more ground.  In my law practice, I’m usually bound by a page limit.  If my sentences are twice as long as they need to be, that means I can make only half the arguments or must cut some of the examples or cases that support those arguments.  And even if I don’t need my whole page limit, I’d rather send a court or a client a well-written 7-page document than a cumbersome 15-page one.  In fiction, clearer, cleaner sentences allow me more space to develop character, advance the plot, or describe the setting.  For these reasons, over half my writing time is spent cutting.  (I’m not alone in this – the saying “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter” has been attributed to many people, including Voltaire and Mark Twain.)

         Writing more simply sounds, well, simple, and it is when comparing two sentences the way I did above.  Looking at an entire manuscript, though, can be daunting.  So I’ve tried to break down some points I look for when editing.

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Get rid of words you don’t need:  Lawyers in particular love unnecessary words, I suspect because we spent a lot of money to go to law school and we want to sound like it.  “Attached hereto is the aforementioned contract” sounds like something a lawyer would write.  On the other hand, “the contract is attached” is just plain English.  One place to spot words you can cut is in prepositional phrases.  In the sample sentences, I changed “in order to” to “to.”  Similarly, “at this point in time” became “now” and “at that very moment” changed to “immediately.”  Using the Find function in Word to search for prepositions, especially “of,” “at” and “to,” is a great way to discover phrases you can simplify.  Read each phrase and ask yourself how you might say it in one word or, at most, two.

Don’t just be -- do:  Another way to make writing sharper is to write in active rather than passive voice.  Active voice:  “her husband hired a detective.”  Passive voice:  “A detective was hired by her husband.”  “We evaluated” (active); “an evaluation was made” (passive).  Active voice shortens sentences and makes them easier to read and understand.  It also keeps the focus on the actor.  If you won an award or a race, don’t you want people to know you won it?  And be excited about it?  “I won the race” sounds a lot more exciting than “A race was won” or even “A race was won by me.”  Of course, sometimes you want to be anonymous.  In his 1987 State of the Union speech, President Reagan didn’t say he’d made mistakes regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, he said “serious mistakes were made…."  Who made them?  Perhaps no one will focus on that.  Another time for passive voice is when you use it to emphasize the object of the sentence.  For instance, if you and your friend have loved every book that won an Edgar Award, and you want to persuade your friend to read a particular writer, you might say, “An Edgar Award was won by this writer.”  The point is “wow, an Edgar Award, that writer must be amazing.”  Yet another reason to use passive voice is when you don’t know who performed an action:  “A tower had been built in the village” might be the only way you can frame a sentence if you don’t know who built the tower.  Short of a good reason to use passive voice, however, phrase all your sentences in active voice and see how much more compelling it makes your writing.  You can find passive voice by searching for the “to be” words -- was, were, is, are.  The word “by” also often signals passive voice (think “was followed by” or “was loved by” or “was won by”.

Trade nouns for verbs:  I also look for instances where I can substitute a verb for a noun phrase.  The phrase “enter into negotiations” is an example of what I call a noun phrase – it uses the noun “negotiations” as part of a phrase that conveys an action.  But one verb – negotiate – can say the same thing.  Similarly, above, the verb “assumed” replaced the noun phrase “made the assumption.”  As with minimizing passive voice, this type of editing not only eliminates words, it makes the sentences more active and interesting.  While doing this, you can replace a noun not only with a verb, but with a stronger verb or a verb that’s more commonly used or easier to read.  “I talked with Beth” flows better than “I had a conversation with Beth” or even “I conversed with Beth.”  Similarly, “I had an argument with Beth,” might become “I fought with Beth.” 

Trade verbs for better verbs:  Replacing a verb plus an adverb with a stronger verb also helps writing clip along.  A few examples:  Walked swiftly: hurried.  Walked casually: strolled.  Laughed nervously: tittered.  You get the idea.  Find the adverbs by searching “ly”.  Also, even if the “to be” words aren’t part of a phrase that’s in passive voice, consider replacing them with a more interesting verb.  “I felt sad” conveys stronger emotion than “I was sad.”  “I grieved” sounds even more vivid.

         According to the book I’m reading about Steve Jobs, he always focused on simplicity in his designs.  I see this when I compare using my iPhone to using my Blackberry.  The Blackberry had all kinds of icons for different functions, but after six years I only knew how to do two things on it – call and email.  I hesitated to switch to an iPhone because I couldn’t imagine what else I’d do with it.  Within two months of owning one, I used it as my daily alarm clock, back up GPS, radio station, oven timer, weather channel, and Internet browser.  And, oh yes, I call and email with it.  So borrow a page from the mobile wars and don’t clutter your writing with words that take up space and seem too cumbersome to figure out.  Instead, have some fun and write the iPhone version of a legal brief, novel or business letter. 

         If you’d like to share your own tips for editing, if you disagree with mine, or if you want to ask a writing or editing question, please do so below.

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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies, click here to join her email list and receive free a short horror story, Ninevah, published exclusively to M.O.S.T. subscribers.

                                             

Being Thankful for our Political Process (yes, seriously)

It seemed like the negative campaign ads went on forever this election season. First the primary ads, then the general election. I don't watch a lot of TV, and I watch even less in real time. But in October and early November, every time I did turn on the television for a quick news update or to flip to the DVD setting, a barrage of foreboding images, jarring music, and criticism of the opposing candidate (whoever that might be) blared at me. Add some of the things people post slamming others' opinions and positions on Facebook and Twitter and there were days I just wanted to turn everything off (and did).

So it might be strange that one of the things I'm most thankful for this Thanksgiving is our political process. But I am. For one thing, every time a new president is elected, the past president leaves the office peacefully and the new one enters peacefully. Likewise when Congress changes over. This seems like a very basic thing that naturally occurs in our culture. That it's not a given, though, struck me when I traveled to Armenia in late 1999 to visit a friend in the Peace Corps who was volunteering there. Just before I went, there was a coup, and numerous members of the government were shot, and other people took over. That's never happened in my lifetime, nor in my parents' lifetimes, in the U.S. (and my dad was born in 1918). Here, we have a change in power through  elections, and when it's time to go, the loser goes, no matter how unhappily.

Also, people in the U.S. can say or write pretty much anything we want short of threatening serious harm to someone else. And there are so many venues for doing so, from shopping malls, to street corners, to blogs, to Twitter, to on-line magazines to pamphlets. I can criticize the president, the legislature, the mayor. I can say that I think George W. is the Anti-Christ or Obama is the Anti-Christ or either one is the worst (or best) president we've ever had and no one will knock on my door in the middle of the night and haul me away to prison.

And if I don't like this country, I'm free to leave. When I was growing up, my mom used to tell me about the Iron Curtain and how most people in the Soviet Union were not allowed to leave even for a visit to another country. If I don't like it here, the government will not stop me from leaving. People can and do threaten to move to Canada or somewhere else if the other party wins the election. While I suspect few of them do so, the wonderful thing is, they can. Or they can run for office themselves. It's a toss up.

Not only can I write what I want, I can read what I want, including news reports from all over the world with a click of a mouse, as well opinions from people all over the world. I don't always want to read all those opinions, but I can. Going back to my visit to Armenia, the country in 1999 was no longer part of the Soviet Union, yet most people I met had radios that got only one station -- the government station. There have been times when our government has engaged in pretty heavy propaganda and when it's been harder than it is now to get news from other sources. But I've always been able to choose from multiple news outlets, and now, perhaps, can choose from so many that it's hard to narrow it down.

Another thing I'm grateful for is that people in this country believe passionately in human  rights and freedom. They may interpret those rights and freedoms differently, and they may argue with one another about them, but they believe in them. Any given section of the Constitution means one thing to me, another to my neighbor, and another to the U.S. Supreme Court, but we all care enough to try to figure out what it means. And to talk about what it means. The justices on our Supreme Court, and the President of our country, and the members of Congress, all take an oath to uphold the Constitution. Rights matter, freedom matters.

These are just a few of things I love about living here and about our political process. My grandparents on my mothers' side died before I turned 7, and I don't remember a lot about them. I will always be grateful to them for coming to this country where they didn't know the language and they struggled through the Depression so that they could give their children and grandchildren more opportunities, and more freedom, than they believed they could find in their own country. I wish I could tell them thank you, but this will have to do.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Follow me on Twitter: @lisamlilly

Visit The Awakening on Facebook:  http://on.fb.me/JUm5sF

Who Built That – Women, Pride, and Success

This Post Also Appears at FEM2.0 http://www.fem2pt0.com/2012/08/25/who-built-that-women-pride-and-success/

I was raised with the idea that pride is a sin – one of the seven deadly sins, in fact. Even children whose families weren’t religious probably heard the adage that pride goeth before a fall. And most of us were taught that bragging is impolite.

How deeply I’d internalized the warnings against pride didn’t become clear to me, though, until I started practicing an exercise in Anthony Robbins’ book Awaken the Giant Within.  Robbins suggests asking questions each morning designed to focus on what’s great in life.  The questions include “What am I happy about?” and, the one I find the hardest, “What am I proud of?”  It’s not that I don’t feel I’ve accomplished anything.  My difficulty is that each time I think of something, I feel almost guilty taking credit for it.  I remember that I couldn’t have done it without having certain advantages – like two parents who loved me and always encouraged me to do my best.  Or I think that it’s not “really” a great accomplishment – for instance, publishing one of my thrillers independently doesn’t count as an achievement because I didn’t obtain a traditional publishing contract and I don’t have through-the-roof sales like John Locke or Amanda Hocking.  Or I fear that the moment I say I am proud of something – for instance, that I’ve successfully run my own law firm for four years – things will immediately take a turn for the worse.  (I’m knocking on wood now.)

I am not alone in this.  Studies show that women much more than men find it difficult to take credit for their accomplishments and talk about them with others.  Organizations formed to recruit women to run for office find that women are far more likely than men to believe they lack the qualifications to hold public office – even when they have the same experience that leads men to believe they are eminently qualified.  Similarly, in business, women are less likely than men to take credit for what they’ve achieved, and more likely to attribute success on a project to the contributions of others.

I saw this in the large firm where I practiced law for many years.  If a new male lawyer worked on a trial team and the case was won, the lawyer was likely to tell everyone he met, “I won my trial.”  Even if the closest he got to the courtroom was to e-mail research findings to the partners actually trying the case.  In contrast, women lawyers in junior positions were more apt to say things like, “We won the case – but all I did was some research.”  Neither statement is entirely accurate, but the male lawyer certainly sounds more confident and experienced. 

In any business, working hard, even if it produces good results, isn’t enough.  To succeed, not only must a person do well, but the people around her or him must hear about those accomplishments.  This is more and more the case as businesses and firms grow, and people stay in positions for less time.  Often the decisionmakers don’t know firsthand what their subordinates are doing.  That women generally are less likely than men to toot their own horns is one of the reasons women fail to rise as quickly as men. 

Of course, there is a downside to too much bragging. People grow tired of hearing someone who only talks about herself or himself.  And a lawyer crowing about “my win at trial” (or the equivalent business deal) can alienate others who know who did what on that particular matter.   

How much credit we can or should take for our accomplishments is something I’ve thought about a lot throughout my career.  When I became an attorney at age 34, many of my younger colleagues had parents who’d paid most of their way through college and sometimes law school, had family members who were lawyers or held high positions in corporations who eased their way into professional life, and/or had social backgrounds such that they never feared picking up the wrong fork during the all-important interview lunches or client meetings.  On the flipside, criminal defense attorneys I know sometimes represent two or three generations in one family who never finished high school and spend their lives in and out of jail.  In my family, getting a speeding ticket was a matter of great shame.  I didn’t know any CEOs, but I had role models who held steady jobs, valued education, and engaged in volunteer work.  I’d like to believe I’d still be an author and an attorney if I had a different background, such as one where most of my friends got pregnant by fourteen or fifteen or where no one I knew went to college.  But that’s impossible to say.

In the end, I want to strike a balance between the issue I share with many women of downplaying accomplishments and the more stereotypical male approach of grabbing the spotlight, between mischaracterizations of Mitt Romney’s approach to business and the mischaracterizations of Barack Obama’s.  So each morning, I think of something I’m really proud of, whether it’s a new sale of my novel, winning an appeal, or helping raise money for an important cause.  Doing that has increased my confidence and made me happier.  At the same time, each day I identify something or someone I’m grateful for – the children’s librarian who encouraged me to write poetry and hunted down books she knew I’d love when I was in grade school, mentors and friends who’ve advised me throughout my life, being born in a time when women can practice law, own a business, and make their own choices. 

Who built that?  I did.  And we did.

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Lisa M. Lilly is an attorney and the author of THE AWAKENING, a thriller, and of THE TOWER FORMERLY KNOWN AS SEARS AND TWO OTHER TALES OF URBAN HORROR. All royalties from 2012 for THE TOWER are being donated to The Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists (AAIM) in honor of her parents, who lost their lives due to an intoxicated driver's choice to drink and drive in January, 2007. THE TOWER is available at: http://amzn.to/nSGpew


THE AWAKENING is available at:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CDXXY0

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-awakening-lisa-lilly/1104252756?ean=2940012849618

I Will Be Out of the Office: Post-Surgery Thoughts on Downtime

Tomorrow I return to work after nearly 7 weeks off following surgery.  (See Goodbye Ovaries.)  During that time, I worked very little.  I hadn’t expected that.  Despite my doctor’s warnings before surgery that I must take at least 4 weeks off and preferably 6, and despite that my surgery expanded to 6 hours instead of the expected 2, I thought I would or should bounce right back.  I figured on 3 weeks of downtime, but with e-mail checking and perhaps a little work even then.  Then I imagined I’d take 1 week as a bit of a vacation and work part-time from home for 2 weeks before I returned full-time.  The last extra week I scheduled I expected not to use.  I scheduled it because I knew it would be easier to come back early if I felt well than to extend my time off if there were complications.

I’ve never recovered from major surgery before.  I had no idea what it was like.  The day after surgery, rather than checking my i-Phone from my hospital bed, I struggled to keep down small bites of toast and jello in the hope that the food would counteract the dizziness and nausea from the pain meds.  The first day home was not much better – my niece later described me as periodically turning into a glassy-eyed zombie (is there any other kind?).  That night, with a switch of pain meds and the anesthesia almost out of my system, I started feeling human.  For the next couple weeks I alternated between sleeping, occasionally chatting or watching half a TV show, and feeling too exhausted to do anything except wish I could fall asleep when I couldn’t.  The good thing about feeling bad was that it freed me from any nagging feeling that I ought to be working.  For the most part, I couldn’t, so it wasn’t an issue.

Around Week 3, I read one brief filed in one of my cases and reviewed and commented on a response to it written by a colleague.  The time I actually spent, and billed to the client, was about an hour.  It took me nearly five hours to do, though, as I could only work in about 10 minute increments with at least half an hour of rest in between. 

What surprised me was that writing fiction was just as exhausting.  I’d thought I would get all kinds of writing done.  I enjoy law, but I know that it’s work.  I love writing fiction, so I rarely think of it as work.  I forgot that it takes just as much energy and mental effort.  I also didn’t consider the fact that sitting in front of a computer requires using the abdominal muscles, which are right in the area where I needed to heal. 

One of the striking parts of my experience was how many people said they hoped I was “enjoying” my “break.”  Just 3 days after surgery, I was asked wasn’t it sort of relaxing to be home and off work.  I was barely out of the zombie stage and still had significant pain, so the answer was no.  The rest of the time was better, but it was only this last week – my extra week 7 – that felt somewhat relaxing.  While I still have a little pain, and I still tire easily, I’ve been able to read, write, and watch DVDs to my heart’s content, if for short time periods.  I’ve also gone to my office a few times to get things in order for my return and to talk to human beings.  (I’ve been talking quite a bit to my parakeet, Mr. Bird, and my stuffed Tigger, so I figured it might be time.)

Also interesting were the responses to my out-of-office message.  Everyone who e-mailed me at my law firm received an automatic out-of-office e-mail explaining I was out on medical leave until mid-July and directing them to contact my assistant for urgent matters.  (She had a list of who could handle issues in my absence.)  Before I left, I called my clients and the lawyers involved in my cases to let them know I’d be out.  I heard from them on rare occasions, but only when there was a real need to reach me.  Most other people who e-mailed me said they’d get in touch when I got back.  A few, though, rather than check with my assistant, just continued to send requests, noting I hadn’t responded before.  Each time, they must have received the out-of-office message.  For the most part, I assumed that the person who kept e-mailing me simply didn’t read the message.  But occasionally people would write to wish me well with my health, but then write back a day or two later expressing surprise that I hadn’t responded.    

Even before the recession, our culture admired excessive work and excessive stress.  We tend to look up to people who say things like, “I’m so busy,” or “I can handle high levels of stress.”  And with the job losses during the last years and the struggling economy, those fortunate enough to have work particularly feel the need to work constantly for fear of losing their jobs or businesses otherwise.  So much so that taking time to recover from serious bodily injury (which is what surgery is, only in a controlled medical setting) seems almost like laziness or at least like an enviable vacation.  E-mail, texting, Twitter and other social media only exacerbate that view.  I love Facebook and Twitter, which help me keep in touch with people I love, make new friends, and publicize my fiction through a means completely unavailable to authors a decade ago.  These are all good things, as is using computers and e-mail to help manage my law practice if I need to be away from the office.  But with all of that comes the pressure of always being “on” in one way or another, constantly being vigilant, never getting away.

So, my resolve as I officially return to work tomorrow is to remember that technology ought to make life easier, not more stressful.  And to do my best to take time for myself when I need it.  I enjoy my work, and I always strive to do my best.  I can’t do my best, and can’t keep attracting work, if I am not well physically and mentally.  And I can’t enjoy life if all I do is work.  As my mom used to say, “Do you live to work or work to live?”  I’d like to make it a mix of both.

Lisa M. Lilly is an attorney and the author of THE AWAKENING, a thriller about a young woman whose mysterious pregnancy may bring the world its first female messiah -- or trigger the Apocalypse. Ms. Lilly is also the author of THE TOWER FORMERLY KNOWN AS SEARS AND TWO OTHER TALES OF URBAN HORROR. All this year's royalties from THE TOWER are being donated to The Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists (AAIM) in honor of her parents, who lost their lives due to an intoxicated driver's choice to drive in January, 2007. THE TOWER is available at:

http://amzn.to/nSGpew


THE AWAKENING is available at:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CDXXY0

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-awakening-lisa-lilly/1104252756?ean=2940012849618