More than Writers

  TIME TO SAY GOODBYE by Olusola Sophia Anyanwu This month, I say goodbye to MTW blogging. I also retire in July. It has been God’s grace upon my life, both as a blogger (with 49 posts over 4.5 years) and an educator (with 23 years of experience) in the UK. Where did the inspiration and strength all come from?  Thank You so much, Papa God. When I retire fully, I hope to give quality time to my writing career. I say a big THANK YOU to everyone who read or dropped their comments on FB or on the blog. Thank you so much.  I’m sure, too, that I’m not the only one who eagerly checks to see the number of engagements their post attracts both on Facebook and the blog. Self-evaluation. Below is a table showing my best MTW post each year!  It makes me wonder what attracts readers to our post. Is it the title, the topic, the blogger or what?   YEAR POST ENGAGEMENT VIEW COUNT POSITION Nov 28, 2021 SMIL...

Last month I considered the way we might choose names for our fictional characters, unashamedly using examples from my own humorous stories for Key Stage 2 children (7-11year-olds). If you’re really heading into the world of unfettered comedy, many options are open to you.   I cited Mr McCavity as the almost perfect name for a Scottish dentist in one of my children's stories. I also used a biblical reference to create a man of the cloth, Reverend Patmos, which may raise a smile for readers in the know.  You can play with initials to make a point: Richard Alan Turner could clearly be the RAT his name suggests; Mabel Alison Drummond might, perhaps, have escaped from an asylum or just be the local eccentric.   You can see how Ruth Leigh did this with her increasingly popular influencer mum, Isabella M Smugge (I Am Smug). Have you ever used this convention yourself? Another great source of inspiration for potential names is a quick trip to your local graveyard.   The cha...

  I remember the first time I attended a gathering of writers. As I looked at the table of books people had brought to sell, it was overwhelming. It seemed as if everyone else there was a published author, whereas I was “just a blogger.”  Fortunately, my feelings of inadequacy were quickly dispelled as everyone was friendly and welcoming. I learned a lot, but I was also surprised to be able to help others who had questions about blogging.  Several years later, I have shared pieces in various anthologies, but mostly I am still “just a blogger.” However, it is now a title I own with pride as I have experienced so many of the benefits of blogging.  Here are just a few:  Blogging helps to establish a habit of writing and posting. However frequently you decide to post on your blog, the key is consistency. I always find deadlines helpful, even if they are self-imposed. Without a deadline, the danger is either that I will never get started or that my quest for ...

Having guest posted twice on the More Than Writers blog, this is my first post as a regular contributor, so I thought I should begin by introducing myself.      The difficulty is where to start.      I could tell you that I live in Edinburgh, I work for a Christian charity with children and young people, I play clarinet in a wind band, and I love musical theatre, but I suppose what you would really like to know about is the writing.      Honestly, I feel unqualified to be sharing here. I don’t have a book to my name, I know my writing achievements pale into insignificance compared to many in ACW, and I’m often tempted to refer to myself as “just a blogger.”      However, I know that’s not the full story.      I began blogging nine years ago. Before that, I had filled many journals but had never shared my writing. Then, sensing a prompting from God to do just that, I stepped out into the unknown, hitting...

Last time I had the privilege of posting on this More than Writers’ blog, I wrote about reading blogs .  Many bloggers become discouraged because very few people read their carefully written blog posts. If that is you, read on! (If not, please don’t stop reading, you might find something interesting!)  Here are some things which will help people find your blog.   Depending which platform you are blogging on, there are ways of adding keywords to a blog post. Here on Blogger, there are labels. On WordPress there are categories and tags. It may be necessary to scroll down to find this option. A few well-chosen keywords will help search engines find the post. Using more than fifteen categories plus tags is counterproductive. I am not an expert in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but have gleaned a little about it. Labels on Blogger Categories and tags on WordPress A title that says what the post is about works better than a clever title. Setting up a profile (Blogger from ...

Firstly, apologies to all fans of The Bard for such terrible misquoting. With that over, let’s get down to business. This is my first post with More than Writers. So you might be wondering, who am I and what am I doing here? I shall try to answer. I'm Natasha. In 2022, I published my first two Biblical fiction novels. It had taken a year to get from completing my first draft to publication, and I could never have done it without ACW. So many people held my hand, encouraged me to publish, showed me what to do, beta read, endorsed and reviewed my books. If you were one of them, you have my heart’s genuine gratitude. Thank you. Due to the genre I write in, I had few choices regarding publishing. Self-publishing it was. Knowing that no-one was going to sell my books except me (and my mother), and never one to do things by halves, I knuckled down on marketing. I set up a website, Facebook page, Instagram profile and TikTok account. I signed up for conferences, giveaways, Amazon ads, pod...

A (new) meandering path At a Bible study group a few years ago, someone said, ‘You have to be doing something if you want God to guide you. He doesn’t move a parked car.’ It’s the same with writing. We have to sit down and write (or type) and hopefully the words will appear. Perhaps as writers we need to really find out what works for us. Do we have ideas while we are engaged in other activities? Tasks around the home, knitting, drawing or local walks may give us the headspace to develop our ideas. What do we really feel called to write? Perhaps it is fiction. Perhaps not. And what about genre? My own writing journey has (so far) taken me on a meandering path. I began with the intention to write children’s stories and took a correspondence course. The problem was that I thought I could write, but I hadn’t really begun to practise the craft, although I had enjoyed researching the genre. After a few rejections I gave up in spite of winning a small prize for one story . (This was in the d...

I’ll tell the story about this sketch of a Fireball  at the end of this post but first... In August, I promised to give some sort of evaluation of the effect of posting a daily themed series on a personal blog. My promotional method is to post a ‘pointer’ to a blog entry on Facebook and Twitter most days, although never on Sunday. These posts are available to anyone, but because they are in the main about science and faith, I do not allow any comment as I suspect I might become the target of zealous Biblical literalists and equally zealous atheists. In addition, I am part of four FB groups with a Christian focus. These groups have between 2 - 300 and 3500 (one group) members. I chose to run this experiment throughout Creationtide. This is the 34 day period designated within most mainstream churches to celebrate the wonders of our planet and our responsibility towards it. It starts on 1st September and ends on St Francis’ Day, 4th October. My contributions broadly follow that theme,...

New Year’s Eve is traditionally a time for looking back over the past year and looking forward to the year, which is about to begin. 2019 has been an eventful year in many ways. I know that many people including me have attended more funerals than in other years. Whether this is inevitable with increasing age and the demographics in the UK I am not sure. Some of us made resolutions at the beginning of the year, including setting out our writing goals. I wonder how many we achieved. There are a number of expressions, which remind us that it is not our own goals that count, but rather what God wants us to do. “Man proposes; God disposes.” More colloquially, “God laughs when people make plans.” And a promise from the book of the prophet Jeremiah 29: 11 “ For   I   know   the   plans   I   have   for   you ,’ declares  the  Lord, ‘ plans  to prosper  you  and not to harm  you ,  plans  to give  y...

The verses from Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 are very well known. (A time to … and a time to …) The word consolidate is absent. The nearest concept to what I have in mind is “a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them”.    Stones might be gathered for building or to clear a field for ploughing.   Why would anyone scatter stones? Perhaps they are skimming them on water (or skipping rocks as they say the other side of the Atlantic Ocean ). Publishing blogs is a bit like throwing stones at random – it is impossible to guess where they will travel to. Making a contents list is gathering them so that they may be more easily found or built into a larger work. A few of the books I have reviewed I have a rather overwhelming task in mind for myself. It involves making an index of all the books I have reviewed over the past seven years and publishing it online. Although I read widely, many of the books are by Christians including some members of the Association of C...

What do you do for inspiration for pieces when you haven’t been given a theme? Do ideas come easily or is it an uphill slog?  Personally, with my blog, I work better to a set structure, like the Five Minute Friday word prompts or the Jesse Tree Advent series I set for myself. Then there was the year long discipline I gave myself to write about one blessing a week, as much a spiritual discipline as anything for a jar-half-empty person like me. When I started on the morethanwriters blog, I planned to use the date as my prompt. That first month – 14 th February – was easy. I thought March would be straightforward too – my grandmother’s birthday – but I strayed from the discipline I had set myself and only now do I find myself returning to it. So what have been the significant events of this date in history? It’s a varied and fascinating list: 2017 Parliamentary citizenship scandal in Australia after the Deputy PM is revealed to be a New Zealand citizen (...