I recently published my first work of fiction, an Alternate history/Sci-Fi novella, The Battle of Watling Street, using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This may turn into a short series of posts, but for now I want to limit the discussion to the technical/formatting challenges and benefits I discovered with KDP. Hopefully this will help […]
Category: Writing Tools
Pinterest Boards for Books: The Battle of Watling Street
I already have Pinterest specifically for my writing, with boards for my two novels-in-progress; you can view them here and here – please do follow the boards if you like what you see, I do follow back! I’m slowly amassing followers on Pinterest, and it seems that with the very targeted appeal of each board, it could be a useful […]
Planning for your Writing Goals in 2017 and Creating A Personal Writing Contract
It’s January, dear reader, so of course, my thoughts turn to new beginnings, goals, and achievables; not for my fitness regime or healthy eating plan (recovering after a brief but brutal holiday tussle) but for my writing. If you’ve read my last few posts you’ll know that 2016 wasn’t the most conducive year for my creative […]
Banshees, Birds and Synchronicity in the Creative Process
I try to ensure I always have the means of making a note close to hand; Evernote on my phone and tablet, a notebook and pen in my bag, a voice record option on my phone. Post-it note pads everywhere. You never know when a great idea will spring to mind! But sometimes circumstances prevent me […]
How to Read Kindle Books without a Kindle
This post sort-of follows on from my last one (Are ebooks changing the way we read and write novels?) With apologies to those tech- With apologies to those tech-savy types for whom this is all old hat, I had a surprising conversation recently with a colleague who was asking how my book will be (eventually) published; when […]
Sowing the Seeds: What Being a Gardener Has Taught Me About Writing
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. (Robert Louis Stevenson) It’s not an original idea, just a homely little blog post, but I keep thinking about how becoming a gardener who can actually grow things is a useful metaphor for how I’m becoming a writer who […]
25,000 words…
“When I write a novel I’m writing about my own life; I’m writing a biography almost, always. And to make it look like a novel I either have a murder or a death at the end” (Beryl Bainbridge) That’s it, I’ve clocked up 25,900 words as at the end of last night, which is just […]
How Low Can You Go? Novels, Novellas and The Renaissance in Short and Micro Fiction
“It had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!” (The Shrinking Man) I’m starting to flex my writing muscles now! As well as working on my novel, And The Buntings Flew, the past few months […]
And The Buntings Flew… on Pinterest
I was reading author J.F. Penn’s newsletter today (check out her excellent site by the way!) and discovered how she uses Pinterest to great effect by having boards for her upcoming novels pinned with pictures which provide tantalising hints to readers of where the stories will take them! Without further ado I headed over to Pinterest, and […]
Why NaNoWriMo was a No No for me – quality, not quantity is my writing goal
NaNoWriMo is a fantastic concept for the budding novelist – the National Novel Writing Month which takes place annually in November saw more than 300,000 budding writers take up the challenge of writing a 50,000 novel in 30 days for the 2013 contest. I signed up in 2013, like so many others thinking this would […]
Using what I know to write about what I know – Using spreadsheets as a tool in my writing
At work I may have many names unknown to me, but one I do know and revel in is “Excel Queen”. I just love spreadsheets; when used properly they have so many uses aside from bean counting and graphs. Excel permeates every aspect of my life, probably because I am a list person, chart your […]
