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. . . what then? Overnight, I’ve been thinking –> maybe the novel form is actually . . . actually, for me. Maybe, apart from the headbanging spacebar challenges I’m having on my ageing MacBookPro, I really need to put my head down and develop the story and the characters of Sequel, just … for… Continue reading But if I actually have to write . . .

Sometimes it feels like just continued pounding away. Creativity is wonderful when the merest hint of received delight is forthcoming, but it’s, well, it’s somehow excoriating to put things out and get nothing back. This image seems like the last thing I’ve done that has elicited any kind of feedback, and that was way back… Continue reading Speaking of banging your head against the wall…

Before I began on this fiction lark, some two years ago with a week’s Writer’s Retreat as part of the Arvon Trust, I was not particularly receptive to critical assessment. But the kind interventions of two experienced authors there, Rajeev Balasubramanyam and Diana Evans, showed me quite clearly how listening and learning, and putting into… Continue reading Critical analysis and author receptivity

Allendale Diary is added to my Amazon/Kindle bookshelf I may have written already about using Calibre to create an eBook from the collated pdfs that went into making the paperback of Allendale Diary. That was fine, as far as it went, and a kind of rough-and-ready version is now being served. But on browsing through… Continue reading The bookshelf grows

During this deliberately fallow period, as I muse on a variety of concepts for Sequel, I’m reading Novacene, James Lovelock’s latest concept book. Published to celebrate his 100th birthday, he seems to begin with a riff on our naturally over-heated planet, which is cooled by the effects of life. A brief reprise then of his… Continue reading Working the science

Although I can’t get excited about creating audiobooks from the first two volumes of the Biome NE47 series until sales take off, I am beginning to feel the stirrings of anticipation for the third volume. Working title: Biome NE47 Sequel. It’s all very well writing in an audience vacuum, but reading aloud feels vaguely pretentious… Continue reading New ideas percolating

It’s Report Card time! I guess this is a companion kind of piece to fit with my previous post. Janus was the god who looked both backwards and forwards, wasn’t he? End-of-year sort of reflections are probably good for the soul, and for many of us, the end of the academic year and the start… Continue reading . . . while looking back

It’s that hard to find beta-readers who will contribute a useful review on the Amazon stores. And until there are a few cheerful reviews, nobody really wants to look at the offering. I get that — I’m the same really. So my main effort over the next few months should really be to recruit as… Continue reading Thinking ahead . . .

I snorted, as my great friend in California once said of some of my writing, snot when I read this piece in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/28/why-do-writers-need-agents-to-keep-track-of-the-rejections And I haven’t even got over the threshold into the literary agency’s offices! On the other hand, the Biome NE47 series seems to. be right in the thick of the… Continue reading What a strange life!

It seems, if I understand Nicholas Erik correctly (here an extended interview with him, outlining his approach to advertising on the Amazon platform), then I should be spending something between US$2000-3000 in a concerted campaign to get my work offered appropriately to a target audience. Well. I was delighted to receive an Economic Impact Payment… Continue reading Getting ready for advertising . . .