Writings of Stuart Whitmore

Does your way of handling your money amount to crossing your fingers and hoping your checks and debit card purchases don't bounce before your next payday? Or do you have a large amount of money sitting in a basic savings account or low-interest CD? If so, you're giving up control of your future by not understanding and effectively managing your finances. If the very word "finances" makes your eyes roll, my new book – released today – is designed to get past that aversion and get you started on the road to financial education. Assets, Budgets, and Credit: A Financial ABC is in the format of a children's ABC book, but it was written for adults and teens who could use a jump start toward effective money management.

The artwork for your book can be created in any medium you prefer, as long as it can eventually be digitized if it doesn't start out that way. When I collaborated with the illustrator for my children's book (Two Boys, Two Planets), she created the illustrations using watercolor pencils on watercolor paper. However, if we were going for a different look then the artwork could have been done with chalk on the sidewalk, or oil on canvas, or wood carvings, or dry-erase markers on a white board, or... well, you get the idea. Basically, you can use anything that can eventually be scanned or photographed to become a digital file. Naturally, that also includes working entirely with digital tools like GIMP or Inkscape right from the start. As long as you are comfortable with the tools and it gives you the look you're going for, you should be fine.

As I expected it to be, September has been insanely busy around here. Lots of task switching (almost none of it optional) has left me little time or mental space for work on my main novel project, which is something I started in 2006 for my first NaNoWriMo and has grown substantially since then. This has not put a stop to my writing, however, as I've managed to sneak in some writing time in much the same way I did for the first novel I ever wrote, and its sequel.

If you ask most authors, I expect they would readily agree that they've thought about many more story ideas than they've written down, and started writing many more stories than they've finished. Perhaps they have a collection of first drafts that have never been edited, too, and maybe some third and fourth drafts that also never made it to the point of being finally done. That's a lot of unrecorded ideas and incomplete stories, when you think about how many writers there are in the world!

I should not have to defend myself from pseudo-anonymous attacks on the Internet in which people are posting false statements about my participation in "taking down" the LendInk site and/or accusing LendInk of piracy. I had no involvement (and still have had no involvement) with LendInk at all. I have also avoided making statements regarding any "piracy" on that site because, from what I understand, there was none, and (more importantly) I have zero experience with LendInk. According to everything I've read, it was a meeting place to initiate legal transactions, so (if that is true, which I have no reason to doubt) I would have had no reason to speak out or take action against that site. For the easily confused, I will state clearly: I have not had, nor do I have now, any complaint against LendInk.