This is K.M. Island and you are listening to the 292 second episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast.

Lately I've been using a little trick to help me stay focused when I'm writing.

I'm working on my historical superhero story

Wayfair set in Regency England so there are a lot of historical details I

have to be aware of as I'm writing. The result is that it's easy to get pulled off track whenever

I run into a fact I need to find or check. Instead of stopping my writing momentum, what I do is stick in a place filler, or my best guess, asked the answer, and I bold it.

So I'll be sure to notice it and remember to check it later when I'm revising. The result is that my writing goes much faster.

My attention is much less scattered, and I get more done. The latest post in the video series on my blog is an easy way to

immediately improve your character's action beats. It shows you how to take your

dialogue's action beats up a notch by focusing on symbolism and subtext.

Find the post, visit my site at helping writers become authors.com. And now I hope you enjoyed this swix podcast entitled

find out if your prologue is destroying your story's subtext. You hear it all the time. Prologs are evil and writers everywhere commence howling.

Now I'll grant that evil is a slight exaggeration.

We might call them dangerous instead.

Except that word is pretty ironic

since one of the chief reasons a prologue is so dangerous

is because it allows authors to play it way

yonder to save. So what in the big green world am I talking about?

Prologue's offer many dangers, a few of which include forcing readers to begin the story twice,

grabbing readers with a fake hook, which also causes the writer the extra work of then having to come up with two brilliant hooks, one for the

prologue and one for the real first chapter.

Creating prime real estate for info dumping, wasting readers time with the intro material instead of allowing

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