by Keri Rozansky | Jan 1, 2026 | Blog
Happy New Year and Welcome to 2026! I’ve spent the last month planning for the New Year and will have some great things in store. A lot of things fell under the category of “Life Happens” in 2025, but I’ll be getting back to those things this year.
I hope you had a fun time with friends and family this holiday season. Did you make any resolutions? Personally, I find resolutions limiting, and sometimes even vague. “I’ll write more this year” doesn’t give you something to work toward. “I’ll increase my social media presence” – okay, but how? I actually started working on that one back in November, when I started posting photos, memes, and articles to social media besides just Facebook and this blog. Then there are the concrete but vague goals, which you can move the dates to fit your motivation. “I’ll outline a new book.” But by when? “I’ll finish the first draft.” By when?
Make sure your resolutions become goals that you can actually measure and achieve. I look forward to sharing my accomplishments with you, as well as hearing about your successes. Let’s talk on Facebook!
by Keri Rozansky | Dec 31, 2025 | Blog
Happy New Year’s Eve! Tomorrow starts 2026. Do you have any big plans, either for tonight or the year ahead? My family usually spends the night in, quietly, just the three of us. We watch movies or play games or enjoy the gifts we got for Christmas. In the evening, I put together a chocolate and fruit fondue like my family used to do when I was a kid. It’s a fun tradition we all love.
I’ve worked on my writing goals for the upcoming year, including releasing my book, writing more, and interacting with you all more. Speaking of which…let’s talk more on Facebook! I’d love to hear your New Year’s plans.
by Keri Rozansky | Dec 31, 2025 | Blog
Should You Keep or Toss the Rules You Learned in School?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a useful tool for many things, including writing to some extent. Nothing can replace the creativity and individual thought of the human brain, so authors and other creatives will never fully lose their importance. Also, language is fluid and ever-changing. The Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and other monitors of the fluidity of the English language record those changes. AI will learn, eventually, but most likely will never be able to completely keep pace.
For non-native speakers and even young native speakers still learning the many quirks of the language, it can be confusing and unnatural. For example: read, read, lead, and lead are four different words. Additionally, ‘lead’ and ‘led’ are also pronounced the same.
There are many things your English teacher taught you that fiction writers often ignore, or manipulate to their needs. When I first created the short story that has become my upcoming novel, my son walked up behind me at my desk. He read what I was writing and immediately said “you can’t start a sentence with ‘because’!”
Actually, I can if I want. If he read the whole paragraph, he could have seen the flow of the words and understood how ‘because’ could actually be the first word of a sentence. Another way to ‘violate’ the rules of English is within the quotation marks. People don’t always speak with proper grammar or sentence structure. Dialogue is an important means of communication and people don’t always speak in complete sentences or with subject-verb agreement, especially in a casual setting with friends or family. A popular example is ‘can’ vs. ‘may’ when asking permission. “Mrs. Smith, can I go to the bathroom?” Of course you can if you have the physical capability. “May I?” is the correct way to ask permission. But it’s universally known that when someone asks “can I (do something)?” they are asking permission.
Do authors break all the rules all the time? No. There are some rules that just can’t be broken, else the desired message can get lost. Most of the time, rule breaking isn’t even really called for. Authors are trying to convey a message, a story, and the ‘rules’ of the English language, which every speaker knows consciously and subconsciously, is an agreed upon way to convey those messages. Even authors who invent their own language for their fantasy worlds have to give that language a basic framework/set of rules that govern how the language is used by those who use it.
Some languages even have cultural differences within them. The English spoken/written in England is different from that of the U.S. (for example, the letter ‘U’ – present in many UK English words like “colour” and “favourite” but dropped from the U.S. versions); Australians also speak English, with their own twists. If you’re in the U.S. or England, you’ll be bar-be-quing shrimp, not ‘throwing shrimp on the barbie’.
What’s your favorite language ‘rule’ to break? Is there a ‘rule’ you would get rid of? Is there a rule you wish more people followed? Let’s talk on Facebook!
by Keri Rozansky | Dec 31, 2025 | Blog
If you’re the kind to make New Year’s resolutions, how do you decide what it will be? Is it something you wish you would have done over the last year, something you hope to continue, or maybe a brand-new endeavor you have planned?
For the past two years I’ve participated in a “Fresh Start” writing program – a full week of online workshops dedicated to gearing up for the next year. It mostly applies to writing, but the workshop leaders encourage improvement in more than just writing.
Looking back on my ambitions for 2025, I have achieved several goals, am still striving toward others, and although I may have ‘failed’ at achieving some of them, I have made bigger strides than ever before. My debut novel hit some bumps and road blocks through the year and will be pushed to a Q2 2026 release (I’ll keep you updated, of course). The book has gone to a professional editor – I worked on other projects including the next two upcoming books while waiting – but due to some life events my debut is still waiting for proofreading.
I had hoped that my second and third books would be drafted (book 2) and outlined (book 3) by the end of the year. Big life changes – including my son starting college and the whole family moving across the country – happened, along with a complete overhaul of book 2, which has put me behind. But I didn’t stop writing. I put work in on these tasks, as well as some other writing projects.
Another big change I made this year in just the last month or so was to ramp up my social media presence. If you follow my socials, you’ll notice an increase in the frequency/amount of posts. Memes, pictures, and ‘fun facts’ join my regular weekly blog post to keep you all updated and engaged.
This year was also a year of learning. I learned what it took to force myself to sit down and write, and how easy it was to make sure I wrote just a little each day. I learned to use new tools to make my writing live easier by scheduling and automating posts to avoid the need to write a blog post or remember to interact with you all on social media. Soon I’ll sit down with myself to decide the direction I’d like to take for 2026. I hope for bigger and better things to come!
And last but not least, thank you to you all who have followed this blog and my social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Substack). You help get me and my work ‘out there’ so it can be enjoyed.
Tell me about your 2025 – what did you achieve, big or small? What are you goals for 2026? Let’s talk on Facebook!
by Keri Rozansky | Dec 25, 2025 | Blog
From my family to yours – Merry Christmas! What are your Christmas Day traditions? Did you have a big meal with family and friends? Open gifts? Relax the day away? Or did you wake up bright and early for the local 5K race?
However you spend the holiday, I hope you enjoy yourself and those you celebrate with!
by Keri Rozansky | Dec 24, 2025 | Blog
No, I’m not killing anyone in real life. But when writing about injuring or killing someone, there needs to be a level of realism. Experts in every field often subconsciously judge fiction – TV, movies, and books – for their realism. My dad is a former police officer and heavily scrutinizes police procedural fiction: ‘that wouldn’t happen’ or ‘it takes longer than a couple days to finish a murder investigation’ or some other detail that needs to be manipulated for the time (or page) constraints of piece of fiction.
Despite time and page constraints, accuracy does matter. There are ‘fast acting’ poisons where the effects can be felt in only a few hours while others take days. Some so long that the victim may not be able to associate the illness to the point in time at which the initial poisoning took place.
Why am I researching poisons you ask? A work in progress, of course! It is all still in research and drafting mode, so I won’t say much more. My detective character is in for some complex investigating when it comes to this.
Since this is by no means a ‘how to’ of any kind, I won’t be listing any of poisons or how my characters plan to use them. This particular line of inquiry has been interesting. I’ve learned of some ‘new’ (to me) poisons as well as various ways to use others I knew of already. I’m trying to create situations that aren’t so overdone that the reader will find it boring or typical and want to skip over things.
What is your favorite method of murder? Is there a poison or weapon that you think is overdone – or maybe not used enough? Tell me about it on Facebook!
