The Evolution of Princess Moxie: From Concept to a Series of Three Novels

I had this idea about a character I wanted to write about. The idea was that this character would undergo radical changes over the course of the story. After a lot of thinking and jotting down notes, I finally found the right story for this character. The initial story idea (a short story) evolved into a pair of novels that led to a third novel.

Princess Moxie is an unusual protagonist. She's obnoxious, self-centered and often in a snit because someone didn't do what she wanted them to do. Moxie's favorite pose is hands on hips, scowling and tapping her toes. Readers don't like her.

So why did I create such a character? Because the great thing about Moxie is her character arc. By the end of Moxie's Problem, readers opinion of here has changed from annoyance to sympathy. By the end of Moxie's Decision, readers are hoping she will be successful in her quest to become the queen. That's a helluva change.

Character arcs aren't an on/off switch. The character can't be one way at the beginning and then a different way at the end with nothing in between. The story has to show the character slowly changing, in incremental steps. And some of the steps have to be negative ones, in which Moxie reverts back to her bad old ways. In effect, the character arc forms a story within the story.

Besides Moxie's story, the novels have a number of characters stolen from the Camelot legends. For instance, I have several battles between Camelot's Knights of the Round Table and the Saxon warriors led by the Hengist (an actual historical figure). However, instead of bloody shield walls, the battles take place on a football pitch using primitive rules and referees.

There are a number of other changes in my Camelot. Stonehenge for instance is a theater-in-the-round available for hire. Merlin investigates the magic of the mind using primitive Rorschach inkblot diagrams.

This strange Camelot and a few of Moxie's adventures bothered me for quite a while: How could I get readers to accept a Camelot that was so different from the beloved legends? One day the answer hit me: my Camelot was in a parallel universe! The perfect solution! And the Princess Moxie novels were launched!

Cover images for the Moxie novels

Here are links to the Moxie novels:

Moxie's Problem

Moxie's Decision

Queen Moxie

Yet another article about favorite apps

header image

I’ve written several articles about my favorite apps and software programs.  Well, this is yet another article on that topic and this one is quite different from the previous ones.  The reason for the change is threefold. One, new and better apps are constantly getting developed and released. Two, my work process constantly changes as it adapts to the new capabilities of the apps and software programs. Third, my work focus changes and new challenges or directions often require new apps.

Notes, marketing, to-do lists, planning: MyMind

I recently saw this mentioned in a Medium article and went to try it out. To my surprise I already had an account so I must of tried this out once before, probably when it was in its infancy. Anyway, I dabbled around for a day or two to get used to how it worked and by then I was hooked. MyMind is a geat app that is easy to adapt to. I now use it to store notes and articles, manage my to-do lists and marketing projects and to write first drafts. This article was the first one I wrote on the app.  

AI apps

I’ve played around with AI apps a bit, nothing serious. I find them rather expensive for a casual user. The one I use the most is Perplexity.Ai. I use it entirely for research and I like the responses I get for my queries. It also has a great feature in that it tells you where it found the information it passed on. This feature can lead to discovering unusual websites. I’d like to find an AI app that will allow me to create a virtual assistant although I don’t know what I’d use the assistant for right now, but I'm sure I could find a purpose for it.

Whiteboards: Scrintal

I love mind-mapping and white boarding.  I’ve used a number of mind-mapping programs in the past and a few white boarding ones.  With the recent re-launch or rebuild of Scrintal, I'm back to using this one as my whiteboard app of choice. I've written several articles on why I love this app so I won't repeat my reasons here except for one biggie. A major activity with whiteboards is connecting thoughts (or bubbles or ideas or whatever the app calls them) with arrows or connectors. A number of whiteboard apps require the manual placements of these arrows and they are static i.e. they don’t adapt when the whiteboard changes.  These arrows have to be manually adjusted.  Not with Scrintal.  It is easy to connect the thoughts and they automatically adapt when the diagram changes, as mine often do.

Brainstorming: Freeform (with an Apple pencil on my iPad)

In the old days, when faced with a problem or to explore a new idea, I’d open a mind-mapping program and brainstorm with myself about that topic.  These days, I open Freeform on my iPad and use my Apple pencil to scribble ideas or jot down notes, draw diagrams, write over stuff and generally enjoy myself while exploring and/or expanding on the topic. I say enjoy myself because using Freeform and a pencil is actually fun.

Scrivener: as a storage container.

I've written over 20 books and numerous short stories and more than a hundred articles. For the my books, they were created with Scrivener. I also use this app as a long-term storage container for stories, articles and other stuff. I previously wrote about this application and you can read the medium article using this link.

On my day-to-day activities I make use of a lot of the usual apps such as word processors, spreadsheets, presentation and others. But recently, I spend more time with Mymind, Scrintal and Freeform than any these other apps.

Have you tried Mymind, Scrintal or Freeform? What do you think of them?

Finally, a note-taking app that works for me!

Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of note-taking apps. Some of these include Obsidian, Heptabase and Gemnotes and others I can’t remember. All of them worked as advertised, but after a while I lost interest in them because they tried to get me to change the way I think and operate. For a piece of software to be successful with me, it has to complement the way my mind works. If the app doesn’t work that way, it will cause problems and I’ll stop using it..

I recently came across an article in Medium that mentioned Mymind. I looked it up gave it a try. Much to my delight, it worked beautifully and impressed me. Mymind has several features that I like.

Spaces is one of them. Spaces operates like a folder. You can crete as many spaces as you wish and each time you add a note, you can assign it to a Space or not. You can also tag the note rather than assign it to a Space. When you add a note, the app provides a number of tags to it automatically which change or ignore.

Another feature I like adds entire articles or just a part of the article. If you add an article that is from one of these sites that sticks ads and videos throughout the article, Mymind will strip all that junk away and let you read just the article. I love this feature.

All in all, I’ve fitted Mymind into my everyday routine and it works great.