On entering a flash competition recently, my Word file was rejected as too large. This alerted me to the fact that many of my short story files have somehow ballooned to file sizes of over 5,000 KB I don't know exactly why, but I know what to do about it. By copy-and-pasting each story as … Continue reading Shortcuts for Transferring Text.
Into Each Life…
Verse and worse (mine): regular writing challenges that tax the imagination.
Images for the uninitiated
How to resize images for the web.
Book Launch Yesterday At U3A
Wendy – the leader of our writing group – held her first book-signing yesterday at a local U3A meeting. Sadly I was travelling home from Cornwall and misssed it, but I hear it went well.
A fantastic new post from Wendy Fletcher.
Wendy signing copies of her autobiography The Railway Carriage Child at the launch in Whittlesey
At the U3A meeting in Whittlesey yesterday I did a book signing session for my first book, The Railway Carriage Child. Over 100 members attended and the afternoon was a great success. I hope that is encouraging to all would-be writers who may be having doubts about stepping onto the public platform with their own creations
Invisible Censorship and Books
I came across this worrying post about sneaky censorship on Unusual Things from Max Florschutz.
Why am I not surprised that Twitter is doing it too…?
I made an interesting and alarming discovery a few weeks ago.
Like most authors, I happen to love reading books as well. Between my local library, the occasional purchase, and my Kindle, I go through a good number of them every year. I have my entire life. Sands, in my small-town library, if I happened to be around the librarians would sometimes ask me if I knew a book a patron was asking about. I read a lot.
So, naturally, I gravitate to places online that talk about books. Forums that offer book reviews, or book chats, etc etc.
It was on one of these forums that I discovered an extremely disturbing trend.
Let me catch you up. One of the book places I hung out at quite regularly—or did, before this discovery, which all but killed my interest in it—was a place for book recommendations. It was pretty simple…
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We’re going on a blog tour!
This is the first post by Jessica Norrie detailing a blog tour for her recent publication ‘the Magic Carpet’. I’d read references to blog tours but this post is the first time I’ve read how to go about it. (In one of the comments, she gives a website that will help).
Subsequent posts tell us how the blog tour went.
I’ll certainly be looking at this idea to help publicise my forthcoming book of short stories.
And then there’s our second writing group anthology…
When I published The Infinity Pool in 2015 I barely knew what a blog was, let alone a blog tour. I didn’t envisage blogging myself, and I had no idea of the goodwill, time, energy and commitment put into spreading the word about books by bookbloggers, helping readers choose and writers survive.
More experienced authors pointed me in their direction and I began to get in touch with them, mostly via Facebook. It could be laborious – not because the bookbloggers were obstructive or unhelpful, quite the opposite. They were generous, informative and kind. But life became full of tasks and lists:
- Identify and visit blogs.
- Get a deeper sense of their flavour by exploring a number of posts.
- Read guidelines, consider if they apply to me.
- If they do, construct a polite contact email.
- Await a reply, consider whether to contact again (most bloggers are very prompt about responding…
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The Railway Carriage Child now in print
Wendy Fletcher is a founder member of our writing group, the Whittlesey Wordsmiths. Her work in progress for many years has, at last, come to fruition and the first copy arrived today. This reblogged post is from the group’s WordPress blog.
Wendy Fletcher with her first print copy of The Railway Carriage Child
About two years ago I joined the local U3A Writing group as its third member. At my first meeting in Whittlesey’s Not Just Cafe, I was able to read a chapter from Wendy Fletcher’s autobiography. It was unfinished and hadn’t a title but it was for me a work of exceptional quality. Today the first-ever print copy was delivered to Wendy she brought it to the Writing Group (Whittlesey Wordsmiths) meeting opened the envelope and together with Wendy, we had the first sight of it.
This is the foreword
Against a backdrop of the Cambridgeshire fens, lies the
small market town of Whittlesey. Here are many features
of historical and architectural interest, including two
medieval churches, a 17th century Butter Cross and rare
examples of 18th century mud boundary walls.
Less well known, but still quite remarkable, are…
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Novice Self-publishing 7: preparing to upload.
The safest way to upload your paperback manuscript to Amazon is as a PDF file. Before converting your Word file to PDF, run the checks below (again). They can all be found in the File tab, to the left of the toolbar, which takes you here... Embedding fonts Whether or not you convert your file … Continue reading Novice Self-publishing 7: preparing to upload.
Into each life…
banshee winds, exhausted by their passion, subside to moans
A dip into Thames history
"the Thames is liquid history."
