How important is your story? To yourself, your children, grandchildren and others who follow? Or to the world at large if your story is of significance to those beyond your family? Don’t decide you are of no real consequence or importance. You have no earth shattering tales to share? You are so wrong. No matter your walk of life or the journey you’ve taken – are taking – your story is so very important to someone. I’m not talking about … Continue reading
I’m nervous about recently requesting the reversal of rights for three of my books. I’d noticed a distinct drop in sales for these stories over latter years. Okay, so my marketing/advertising, particularly this last year, has been less than ideal. I accept this as a contributing factor. But how to attract new readers to these older stories? One obvious suggestion is to re-release them myself. Hence me asking The Wild Rose Press for a reversal of rights for “Devon’s Dream”, … Continue reading
How do you write? Are you a planner or a pantser? Do you plan to such an extent others might call you anal? Or do you just sit at a keyboard and see what flows from your fingers? What’s buzzing around inside my head right now is the wonder if I’m making my writing life so much more difficult than it needs to be. I’m definitely a pantser. But worse than that, I’m now finding I rarely write in chronological … Continue reading
I love to talk about writing. Recently I discovered a fantastic outlet to talk about writing. Not to obviously established or budding writers but to the “ordinary” public. On two recent breaks I have been given the opportunity to present talks to anyone interested in attending. I’ve been thoroughly encouraged by how many people are keen to attempt to write something. I talked about novel writing in one presentation and writing romantic fiction in another. Novel writing drew a larger … Continue reading
How Much Research Is Necessary? I’m often asked how much research I do for my stories. Well, I have to admit, not too much. Depending on the romance sub-genre you write for, the level of research necessary for your stories varies greatly. For a writer of historical fiction, careful research is vital. Anyone writing fantasy has to build characters/worlds for their stories which I imagine relies on extensive research. Same applies to futuristic romance. Thankfully for contemporary romance stories, … Continue reading
My Writing Space My writing space is one place and one place alone. Some writers sound like they’re very fluid when it comes to settling down to do their writing. I read social media posts of people writing in bed, on their patios, in their cars, on the beach. I wonder how they manage this. Me? I work in an office in my house. Working on a PC rather than my laptop does limit my locations, but I think I’ve … Continue reading
Lacking Confidence Shouldn’t Stop You From Writing That Book Within You So the thought of writing that book might be rolling around inside your head, but you’re lacking confidence to actually start? You have far too many doubts pushing aside any possibility you’ll actually produce something readable. Well, I’m here to suggest now is the time to ignore those doubts. Take a deep breath and launch yourself head first into a writing frenzy. Don’t wait. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t let that … Continue reading
There Are Hazards of Scheduling Posts While keeping up with posting on whichever social media or web sites you manage is deemed to be essential to maintain a base of clients, consumers or fans, it can be so time consuming. Enter the ability to schedule your posts. The designers of the sites have made life easy for us. Just start banking up your posts and hit ‘schedule’. Easy. But hey, hold on. There are definitely hazards of scheduling posts ahead … Continue reading
Weak Words Led To Ineffective Prose There are many ways one can recognise an inexperienced writer as one reads a story. Experience (and often a quality editor) helps a writer focus and tighten their work. Using weak words is one of my failings as I rush through writing a story by the seat of my pants. Having a few published books under my belt does not make me an expert by any means. But I have found a few tricks … Continue reading
Taglines and Loglines Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with taglines and loglines for my next new release “Impossible Liaison”. Rather than risk getting it wrong, I resorted to good old Google to help me out with differentiating between the two. According to the first option which popped up: A “logline” is a (movie’s) concept boiled down to one or two sentences. A “tagline” is a short, clever one-off found on a movie’s poster. I saw … Continue reading