Contents
1. The Darkness Beneath - Free Copy
2. It's All About You
3. Writer's Blues
The Darkness Beneath: Sex, Death and Trains, all Yours For Nothing (still!)*
You can get a free copy of my first novel, The Darkness Beneath, by following this link - but hurry! Only the first 100 people to sign up can claim a free copy. *Terms and Conditions apply.
It Is All About You!
We had a cracking IAAY from Russ King who has, among other things, managed to turn his experience of working from home into a novel. Given that I've been working from home for 6.5 years now, maybe I should take a leaf or two out of his book.
As A Writer...
I'm fascinated by the process of writing, both mine and other people's, and just how much of that is a learning experience. I recently started re-drafting my second book, The Girl Who Dreamt of Water, and was shocked to find how badly written the first few pages were. Actually forget that: how about the first few lines?
I was not only shocked by how poor some of the sentence structure was, but also how I'd just not written what I intended to write. OK, I nearly wrote what was intended, but it was a long way from what I can now see I should have written.
The question is, how could this have happened and how can I avoid it in the future? I'd be fascinated to know how other writers deal with this sort of thing and how you feel when you think you've finished something, only to go back later and find it needs a lot of re-writing.
For example, how do you deal with finding out that you've deluded yourself into believing what you wrote was good? It stopped me in my tracks and for a while I was at a loss to understand what had happened. I even wondered if someone had been tampering with my MS (about 99% impossible), so it must be my fault (of course it is!). I've managed to get over that now and have started a massive re-edit. It's annoying and frustrating, but in terms of meaning, it's a cold hard lesson that I won't forget.
And as I'm currently an indie-author, it's a lesson I, and we, all have to accept. There's far too many stories in the press about poor quality work from indie-authors.This isn't because we're lazy or inherently rubbish, but because we don't have the resources traditional publishers have. By that I mean the people who scour our MS's to weed out all the bad grammar and plotting errors etc: an independent pair of eyes can see farther than our own.
Instead we have to makes ourselves work ten times harder on the writing and editing whilst accepting that what we do is worth less than the price a cup of coffee. And if that isn't the best motivational poster you've ever seen for being a writer, I don't know what is.
Cheers.
1. The Darkness Beneath - Free Copy
2. It's All About You
3. Writer's Blues
The Darkness Beneath: Sex, Death and Trains, all Yours For Nothing (still!)*
You can get a free copy of my first novel, The Darkness Beneath, by following this link - but hurry! Only the first 100 people to sign up can claim a free copy. *Terms and Conditions apply.
It Is All About You!
We had a cracking IAAY from Russ King who has, among other things, managed to turn his experience of working from home into a novel. Given that I've been working from home for 6.5 years now, maybe I should take a leaf or two out of his book.
As A Writer...
I'm fascinated by the process of writing, both mine and other people's, and just how much of that is a learning experience. I recently started re-drafting my second book, The Girl Who Dreamt of Water, and was shocked to find how badly written the first few pages were. Actually forget that: how about the first few lines?
I was not only shocked by how poor some of the sentence structure was, but also how I'd just not written what I intended to write. OK, I nearly wrote what was intended, but it was a long way from what I can now see I should have written.
The question is, how could this have happened and how can I avoid it in the future? I'd be fascinated to know how other writers deal with this sort of thing and how you feel when you think you've finished something, only to go back later and find it needs a lot of re-writing.
For example, how do you deal with finding out that you've deluded yourself into believing what you wrote was good? It stopped me in my tracks and for a while I was at a loss to understand what had happened. I even wondered if someone had been tampering with my MS (about 99% impossible), so it must be my fault (of course it is!). I've managed to get over that now and have started a massive re-edit. It's annoying and frustrating, but in terms of meaning, it's a cold hard lesson that I won't forget.
And as I'm currently an indie-author, it's a lesson I, and we, all have to accept. There's far too many stories in the press about poor quality work from indie-authors.This isn't because we're lazy or inherently rubbish, but because we don't have the resources traditional publishers have. By that I mean the people who scour our MS's to weed out all the bad grammar and plotting errors etc: an independent pair of eyes can see farther than our own.
Instead we have to makes ourselves work ten times harder on the writing and editing whilst accepting that what we do is worth less than the price a cup of coffee. And if that isn't the best motivational poster you've ever seen for being a writer, I don't know what is.
Cheers.
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