More than Writers

  The hardest parts of any job are the tasks that aren’t the actual job. I had a wonderful, healing time writing Sapphire Beach, but what do you do when you get to The End? Turns out, the rest of writing a story is more complex than just telling a story! Parts of the process I really enjoy, like making the cover. Other parts, like marketing and making yourself known I enjoy but find them time consuming at the same time. Building a website is a fiddly job and involves a lot of nitty gritty details. I also have one of those pullup banners, which is a fiddle to set up without losing fingers, but looks good once it’s up. The problem with both banner and website is the upkeep of it. The banner is now out of date, as I have another book published since I ordered it. My website is in desperate need of an overhaul, which is time consuming and needs my full attention, even if it’s for an hour. I also have a podcast, which was rather ambitious and made me very nervous. I did enjoy it, al...

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay images. If you haven’t read Mnemonic by the wonderful Brian Bilston, I highly recommend it. It is his take on what seems to be the longest month - January. I guess it doesn’t help we’re still well into winter, the evenings still draw in much earlier than we’d like, and there is less natural light around (though things will be getting better on that front by the time this post goes out).   So we press on towards the fact even January must end and spring will come. It is a matter of time. Hands up, anyone who finds it easy to be patient. I’m not raising my hands, by the way.  But pressing on and being patient are crucial parts of both our Christian lives and our writing ones. I know. Logically, with time, we should be getting better at both, right? We’ve got all of that experience of our spiritual lives and writing ones under our belt, right?  Hmm… I am very much a work in progress on both fronts, but I find th...

Image from Wikimedia Commons Have you ever indulged in a bit of aspirational recipe-clipping while eating your porridge? I have, and I’ve got two folders stuffed full of scraps of paper to prove it, some of which go back a few decades.  What behaviours do you indulge in that go nowhere but give you a warm, fuzzy feeling? During the pandemic, I started a few writing habits. One was adapting AA Milne’s poetry with a lockdown slant. I was rather proud of one of them, and a family member shared it in her U3A writing group.  I also started writing 1,000 random words a couple of times a week with the intention of getting my thoughts on the page and garnering ideas for articles. I write with a potential reader in mind, and sometimes use this material as the basis for an article or blog post, such as this one.   What do we do with the wealth of information we hold in the form of clippings, cuttings and random notes on our computers? How can we collate them, or do we sometimes hav...

  I’ve been thinking a lot about waiting recently. This morning, I was in a queue of over 30 to get a call back from the doctor’s surgery. Just to arrange a phone consultation. That’s three times now I’ve rung to make an appointment to discuss test results. This kind of waiting is dispiriting. But at least with the wonderful (mostly) technology of mobile phones I was able to carry on with my morning dog walk. And I’d like to say my walk was filled with productive writerly thoughts. Sadly the reply came that there were no appointments left and I needed to try again the next day. I suppose I got a bit of a blog theme out of my following grumpiness so not all bad…   So, my random thoughts on waiting took me back to the '70s and good old R.I.E (Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh to the uninitiated). When a ward was on call for emergencies it was ‘waiting’. If things got too challenging another ward would take over the mantle. When waiting is difficult for us as solitary writers can we...

Are you analytical? Do you want to know why some things work and why others don’t? Do you analyse your KDP keywords, description and categories? In January, many people analyse and take stock of things, such as career choice, where you live, weight, how many books you read last year, how many you will read this year, etc. I have spent the last six months populating, growing and analysing my YouTube channel, and every day I learn more about analytics and algorithms. This led me to look at the analytics for blogger.com and More Than Writers, in particular, the 42 monthly blogs that I have contributed. There aren’t any in-built tools as such, although there is some data for views and comments that can be extracted. I love spreadsheets, so why not use one for this purpose? The ratio of views to comments is interesting. I have received a total of 19,036 views and 357 comments. When you consider that half of those comments are me responding to people, the number is significantly low. ...

 Is January really only 31 days long? Was Christmas really only one month ago? It feels ages... and not simply because the weather has been horrid, but because I hit a roadblock in the Work-in-Progress, aided and abetted by days-off that derailed my routine. I enjoy routine. I've managed to write the last six or so books on a routine of one hour every morning, five days a week. But what with Christmas and New Year (I'm a Scot, so Hogmanay and New Year are significant festivals for me!), my routine slid. And like an avalanche in the Swiss Alps, one little slip was the beginning of a hurtling descent into nothingness. No hour at the desk. And no hour at the desk means no writing. And for me, no writing means no joy.  I grumbled at the snow. I muttered even more balefully at the days of endless rain (when the water butt overflowed onto my patio requiring venturings out in wellies to deal with it - and buckets...) And then inevitably the larder was bare and I had to leave my burro...