Authors Electric

At my time of life I didn’t expect to find myself accepting a writing challenge utterly new to me. But that’s what has happened and I feel elated and yet, though I’ve made a start and am fairly pleased so far, I still have a nagging fear that it may not turn out well after all. In my June blog, I told how I had , with some misgivings, accepted Margaret Quon’s invitation to write the copy describing  all her products for the website for her new online shop. Copywriting was something I’d never done before. It seemed to me a specific skill which needed a special training (though, looking at what passes for persuasive prose in most advertisements, I didn’t think it could be very good). But I started it, warmed to the task and Margaret was pleased. Then came another challenge. Looking back, I can’t remember which of us first suggested it.  It suddenly stood there, a definite, cut and dried decision to do it. Margaret is starting a project to sell birthstone earrings and ...

I never thought I would equate myself with the 'lady from the provinces' on the Lord High Executioner's 'little list' in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. But circumstances have conspired to make me. The last two months have been really rather extraordinary. Up till then, my writing life had proceeded like it has for the last four years. There's been perilously little new writing. Two big projects , the completion of the Ellen trilogy and The Second Man from Porlock, my Coleridge novel, keep being put off partly because other things persist in turning up and partly because I sometimes think that, deep down, I'm a bit afraid of them. Instead I've been preparing, and, twice, almost rewriting, books for Kindle, making selections of short stories from over the years on Createspace and at last publishing new work both on Createspace and for educational publishers. And there are two books nearly ready to go on Createspace, which I blogged about before....