No publishing challenge post again today as I’ve been stupidly busy. One day – one day – I *will* manage my time and my workload a lot better. In the meantime… The short story Burn is out today! This story
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Time management
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Tuesday afternoon was more ghostwriting. I was late getting started with it, due to date work and scheduling a couple of blog posts in advance. But by the time I got around to it,
Read moreA better day
I had a much better day yesterday. 10-project planner Once I’d written yesterday’s blog, which was 1,293 words before I even started anything else, I moved on to my 10-project planner to add in all the projects I’m working on
Read moreNaNoWriMo Prep: Day 5
My NaNoWriMo for 2020 starts today. I’m still having weekends off, and I’m still having some long weekends with the poet. This means that my daily target is just under 3,000 words. I’ll also be a (working) day behind on
Read moreTier 3 lockdown
Here is another image from our walk around Hatfield Moor last week. I love that blue glow on the water. It makes it look like some kind of grotto, or as though something magical may emerge at any moment. As
Read moreI’ve been having a play …
… because, like, I’m really, really busy. Everybody else seems perfectly able to use Canva for promotional material, but I didn’t even know where to start. And when another one ended up on my newsfeed in Facebook, I just had
Read moreDiary of a pocket novel – and an oxymoron …
I’ve always wanted to write a pocket novel. There are two of our weekly magazines who publish pocket novels (PNs) – or apx. 39,000-word novellas – and as far as I know they both publish something like two PNs a
Read moreDiary of a Novel: special characters – part 2
Okay, at the start of this week I’d hit a brick wall and was struggling with whether or not to have a “supporter” character in my story. I’ve been playing around with this all week, shuffling between various scenarios. Could
Read moreDiary of a Novel: special characters – part 1
Now, when I say “special” I don’t mean “special” as such, I mean “other important characters not mentioned already”. According to Ron D Voigts and Writing the Killer Mystery, these “special” characters consist of the following: sidekick opponent supporter My “sidekick”
Read moreDiary of a Novel: the sleuth
I didn’t get very much work done on the novel at the weekend as we did shopping and gardening on Saturday, the poet had a gig Saturday night, and we were out all day Sunday, walking. Saying that, I did
Read moreDiary of a Novel: 2 April 2019
Having abandoned – temporarily – Catch the Rainbow, yesterday I started work on The Beast Within: a Marcie Craig mystery. Marcie Craig is the main protagonist and amateur sleuth in my first novel Night Crawler. Whereas that novel was set
Read moreWhat took them so long?
*** AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION REQUESTED *** For the past four weeks there has been an inquest into the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974. Much of my book, Catch the Rainbow, was set against that period. Some of the plot hinged on
Read moreNaNoWriMo 2018 – day 8
So now I’m thinking, if I can do this in November for NaNoWriMo, why can’t I do it the rest of the year as well? My daily target is 2,000 words, which means I can also have 5 days off.
Read moreNaNoWriMo 2018 begins
And so it begins again … I was a little late to the party this year. For the past few years I’ve been ready to go by the end of play on 31 October. This year, I finished most of
Read moreNaNoWriMo 2018 – decision made
With only a week to go I finally made a decision, and I’m hoping it’s the right one … bit of a gamble, but that’s how it goes. This year I’m being a NaNoReBel – again! Last year I chose
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