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This morning I thought I’d re-configure the cover that I put together for the first drafts of Biome NE47. The simple slab of an eBook cover needs to be dynamic, exciting, attractive and compelling. The browser must really need to look closer. I’m very optimistic about the cover, but after compiling it together with the… Continue reading Getting the eBug today

I’ve held off on generating any prototype eBooks until I had a sense of the right cover image for them. Yes, ‘them’ as it were; the bonfire in the square is an obvious candidate for what I think of as ‘the main event,’ the first and most elaborate novel written in the Biome NE47 series.… Continue reading eBook research

The world of the independent self-publisher is a strange and tangled one of intrigue and invigilation. It’s taken me months to get my head around the strategy. It’s not that the kind advice proffered by Jericho Writers is confusing, which it isn’t, but it’s rather that there’s so much to learn and do before you… Continue reading The marketing gambit

After the little crunch a fortnight ago, when the last chapter and Epilogue didn’t move, and I realised I had to buckle down and get a, well, try to make a brilliant finish of the thing … after that, it’s been an intriguing odyssey. In many ways, I’ve felt a real synergy between the first… Continue reading A wrap for the first draft

I’m in love with the music, dancing about the place in my mind, on a kind of ecstatic high. I’m in love with the creativity involved in generating the Reader’s Magnet for the whole Biome NE47 series. Things came crashing together, over the past week, fortnight maybe, and the larger piece, some 11.5k words, has… Continue reading In love with the magnet

I imagine every writer has a beloved ‘first reader’ to look over their work. Not someone who’s going to offer unmitigated praise, but rather someone who can proffer some simple truths. So my first reader and I sat down, when she’d finished the 200 pages, and wondered together what was right and what was wrong… Continue reading First read-through . . .

At first, I thought maybe I was just being lazy. You know, you get so far, and then you want it to be over, finito. Maybe it’s the laziness talking, trying to persuade me that the story is finished. Being that close to it, before another reader gets their mind around the concepts, the multiple… Continue reading A slight re-think

Having tried to work steadily along, moving from Chapter 5 into and through Chapter 6 of Prequel, I’m beginning to have that ‘endgame’ feeling. My plan has been to create an exciting Prequel to what I think of as ‘the main event,’ the novel proper. The Prequel was planned, sketched, envisioned as having seven chapters,… Continue reading Moving into the endgame?

I’ve begun to treat the endless competitions that seem to come around daily these days as a kind of stimulation for the ‘real’ writing day. The ‘real’ writing is my ‘work’ while the fun is often found in smaller tasks. Micro-fictions, the tiny stories that are usually exactly 100 words, no more and no less,… Continue reading Writing exercises

I often wonder if there really aren’t innumerable ways to create a novel, or a book series. I hope so, because I seem to be going about it in a very backwards way! The ‘main event,’ which I hope is finished, was a year in its creation, and then came the extensive editing. So far… Continue reading Doing it all backwards