February Update -- Joy Kluver

By -

In my January post, I wrote about a few things I was doing to help banish the blues. Did they work? Well, not quite but compared to other Januaries, I did fare better.

First off - my writing. I've reached the point with my MS where I need another pair of eyes on it. I have a beta reader who's the first to see my books. An avid reader and former police officer, she's great at picking up mistakes. I still have some more research to do but my goal of sending DI Bernie Noel 4 to my editor by the end of February is still on track. And I've just secured a copy editor/proofreader who will do both of those things for me. My cover designer has come up with a great idea too, so it feels like things are coming together. Now, I just have to get my head around creating a newsletter and finding subscribers, building a better website and trying to work out how to do Facebook ads!

The other idea that's mulling in my head is still there and requires some more thinking!

I've started the writing group at West Barnes Library and, including me, we had ten people for our first session. It was lovely to connect with other writers again and encourage one another. It brought back fond memories of writing classes with Elizabeth Kay and N.M. Browne. I'm not teaching though, as I consider this a group rather than a class. Hopefully, we can all share our experiences together.

Choir! At time of writing, I've only had one session. The conductor is very enthusiastic and it was nice to be singing again. Having said that, my voice is in pretty poor condition at the moment and needs a lot of work. I have one more free session to go and then I have to decide whether to join or not. I'll let you know next month! When I left choir, I saw the moon had a halo around it. Anyone else see this?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts

A Few Discreet Words About Caesar's Penis--Reb MacRath

By -
Image
Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There  was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts
Read more

Margery Allingham and ... knitting? Casting on a summer’s mystery -- by Julia Jones

By -
Image
The Watchtower from the Saltings  (Photo Tom Barr)  How to connect a 1940s naval watchtower on the Tollesbury marshes, a brilliant Scottish knitwear designer and my all-time favourite novelist?   The investigation led me along the single-track lanes south-east from Tollesbury, heading towards the end of the old railway line to Tollesbury Pier. I began to get goosebumps as I remembered coming here before. Once on a long walk with my dog, when I was never quite sure where we were trespassing but was determined to explore anyway.  That was when I first saw the six-sided building, stark and guarded against the weather. Then I saw it again in my imagination: ‘It’s a t-tower,’ said David. Xanthe loved the way he said it with a shiver of excitement in his voice. ‘It’s in the m-middle of a f-field and it looks right down the r-river.’ ‘And when it was wartime the Navy built it so they could keep a lookout against invaders,’ added Kieran. ‘Then p-zow they’d press a button and the whole
Read more

As Time Goes By

By -
Image
 Dooley Wilson, Ingrid Bergman, "Play it, Sam." 1942 I turn 87 on the 16th of this month. That means I was five years old when Ilsa Lund asked Sam to play As Time Goes By . No wonder I've been a lifelong romantic (who writes about time travel a lot.) I vaguely remember first seeing Casablanca at a theatre with my mother. She elbowed me from a Hershey-bar stupor to see one of her Hollywood bit-actor friends, Frank Puglia, as a Moroccan vendor selling Ingrid Bergman a scarf. I posted about Puglia here in 2020. (See " The Phantom of Dream Streets .") It was 1943. I was a precocious kid who could read the funnies and the headlines of newspapers delivered to our front steps every day. I hid under a marble-topped coffee table during air raid drills, laughing at the game of sirens, closed drapes and wardens waving hooded flashlights.  My mother, wth my Nonna Rosa, c. 1960 My Rome-born Nonna Rosa, still kept milk in an "ice-a-box." She didn't own an elec
Read more

Dress to Impress your readers! by Elizabeth Kay

By -
Image
 Every so often you come across a book where what people are wearing is described in great detail. After a while it becomes annoying as you want to get on with the story, not the author’s attempt at visually fixing a character in your head with irrelevant detail. Their mannerisms, disabilities and speech patterns may be far more effective. So if you’re going to describe someone’s clothing, it must be important. My first example is from my children’s book The Divide , set in alternative world, where the different sorts of human-like mythical beings are distinguished by the colour of their clothing. "Tansy had never been to Tiratattle before, and Ramson was pretending to be more familiar with it than one school visit could possibly have made him. He refused point-blank to ask directions, and denied outright that they’d been past the chalice stall three times. The shops were full of candles and incense burners, their designs quite unlike anything Tansy had ever seen in Geddon. There
Read more

What's Your Angle--by Reb MacRath

By -
Image
You may be in either camp or be a hybrid, as I am. In the course, though, of writing a novel we may all come to the same block: we know where to go  and exactly what to do there...but we can't seem to figure out how to get there smoothly and efficiently. I found myself on a roll with my WIP when the ending of the seventh chapter threw me for a loop. Consider: Chapter 7 ends with two of the three main characters--let's call them A and B--engaged in risky business in a small Arizona town. They've arranged for C to follow them days later on a different pretext, apparently looking for work. But, unknown to them, something has happened in Tucson. Chapter 8. Change of POV. Cut to character C, left behind in Tucson. Because of what's happened, he chooses to leave a day early though he can't reach A and B by phone. The challenge: getting him on the road and to his destination, while filling readers in on the Tucson tragedy. Road trip? Flashbacks? I tried a dozen different t
Read more