Authors Electric

Image Credits:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Many thanks to Julia Pattison for taking the photo of me at my editing workshop. Also thanks to Janet Williams for taking the image of me at a recent Book Fair. It was lovely taking part in a Book Fair in July. The last one I took part in was before the pandemic. It’s hard to imagine just how much that changed so much for so many so quickly. What was great was there was a good turn out for the fair (over 100 people). Like the authors present, everyone seemed pleased events like this are back.  In my part of the world, the nearest bookshops are miles away. I spread the word about the event as much as possible and my slogan for my marketing of the event was “bringing the books to you”. That is one of the great joys of a book fair.      Another is seeing a good range of books covering a wide range of ages and tastes. The organisers of the event also kept the writers well supplied with tea, coffee, a...

  Here we are three weeks into a brand new year. I have never been one for Resolutions. I am too fickle to keep them going. The sense of disappointment and self loathing which comes from failing at them is overwhelming. I just don’t do them. I have decided to see what each new year brings. 2020 for me, started as normal. Then lockdown came and my autoimmune problem meant I was working from home. Once the decision was made, I was escorted out of the building clutching my briefcase, my desk calendar and my plant and warned that I would not be back in the foreseeable future. I felt like a kid let out of school early. I could work in my jammies, drink enough coffee to floor a horse,  pig out on chocolate and crisps,do my laundry if I wanted,  in short, be my own master.  Then, new normal hit home and I rode the rollercoaster of emotions and problems which came along with that. I had not realised that I could be so vulnerable to a tiny organism that I had to stay closeted...

As a dedicated procrastinator, there are lots of things I keep putting off doing. They range from making an appointment with the dentist, to swapping some theatre tickets from one date to another, to writing up the minutes for the Annual General Meeting of the local organisation of which I am currently secretary. I suppose the road to my personal hell, if I believed in it, would definitely be paved with intentions, not all of them good, although from my point of view not exactly evil either. I realised when I thought about this that I use a variety of excuses to put off doing things, but they tend to fall into two main categories. There are things I don't really want to do at all, like going to the dentist, and things I think don't have time for, such as writing up the minutes. Writing up my family history research, which is very much on my mind at present following a real-world meeting with a distant relative from Utah, is an odd one as I think I really want to do this, but...

Oh, God! It’s the end of September and my head is still in August. For the first time in twenty-five photo 'Cherwell' years I don’t have a child starting school or university and I am disoriented and confused. I haven’t had to argue over school shoes, iron-on labels, choose pencil cases, or duvet covers, visit Ikea or shoehorn hair straighteners into a car filled to bursting with black bin bags of essential stuff. It is zombie apocalypse levels of weird.     I never get much done in the summer: I am lured by walks in the countryside, the odd glass of rose´ overlooking the river, or coffee out-doors watching the world go by, indulging in a little light gossip. I have lots of useful thoughts but I store them like nuts for colder weather.           This year those signs which tell me it’s time to stop metaphorically gathering hay or wool (or whatever the damn phrase is,) the secret semaphore signals to my brain to tell me to knuckle ...

I've been writing for a while. Long enough to recognise its patterns. I blogged about them on my own blog  http://bookdoctornicky.blogspot.co.uk/ One of the patterns is to forget about the patterns. I started a new blog and a new business as a 'book doctor' and writing tutor as yet another form of procrastination and I was going to write about procrastination. To procrastinate I checked if I'd ever written about it before. Yep - another pattern I'd forgotten- at some point in the blogging year I write about procrastination Here is one from http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/ way back in 2008: ' I have a confession to make: I am a procrastinator and a time waster and there is no twelve step programme to help me. I waste a lot of time reading blogs and I mean a lot of time. I love the clever ones with multiple links, the erudite ones and the guilt-inducing ones that demand I lend support to obscure causes. I adore the witty ones and the bitc...

Every serious writer is a master of procrastination. I am sure that, if you are reading this, you are  already on track. However, if you are running out of ideas, I would like to share with you my top procrastination tips. I can guarantee that if you follow these, you will never finish a novel again. 1.      Make a ‘to do’ list. If you think list-making helps avoid procrastination, you are doing it wrong.     There is only one possible pad you can use for list making and only one pen. You keep them in any one of several places about the house. To find them you will have to clean your office/workspace, reorganise your bedside cabinet and clear all kitchen surfaces. Clearing kitchen surfaces necessitates making room in your cupboards. Your pen is obviously a cartridge pen which takes only one (obscure) brand of cartridges which are rarely in stock anywhere, necessitating several hours online and/or a shopping expedition.    ...

Almost a year ago, I wrote about overcoming writer's block . I had intended to write about procrastination the next month, but I kept putting it off until I didn't have time anymore, so I picked a fight with Ruth Graham that was about as successful as the one I picked with John Green . I tried to tackle procrastination again the next month, but instead I preached to the choir again about the benefits of self-publishing . Each month something else until finally, my procrastination reached epic proportions by convincing me to embark on a six month journey counting ten books . This month, I say, "No more!" This month I am going to tackle that tiger headlong. This is it. This is the month, I discuss the evils of procrastination and give advice on tackling it. [add witty caption later] Procrastination is a sneaky bastard. We all think of it as just putting off important work, but it is so much more than that. Sur...

A couple of years back I wrote an agony aunt page here on Authors Electric, so this month I thought I’d continue on a similar theme, but more in the spirit of receiving, rather than giving advice out like blue smarties. I mean there’s just so much advice out there, isn’t there? Everywhere you look are helpful people telling you how to do things you never even knew you should be doing! Write what you know! But I’m not an axe-murderer and there are no fairies at the bottom of my garden…. You should always start a novel with action. Well I’m sure we can all think of a hundred books that start with something other than action. Write every day. Plot everything/don’t plot everything. Write a synopsis before you start/synopses are a waste of time. There are whole books about plot and character development, what exactly a 3 rd person deep POV means and how and when to use it. You can drown in it all. The point is that you can take advice until you’re blue in the face. You can...

Coincidences don’t have any place in fiction (or  so we’re always told) but when I was desperately trying to think of a theme for this month’s post, one thought kept creeping in. "If I didn’t have to spend so much time on Facebook, Twitter, and – dare I say it – blogging. I would be able to concentrate more on my writing." Then I realised that Ros said pretty much the same thing in her post yesterday. Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy blogging and it is an exercise in writing after all.  I have my own blog, a blog I run with friends, and of course 'Authors Electric' and I love them all dearly, but all this 'social networking' lark does tend to run away with the time, sometimes. The trouble is, as Ros says, in order to sell your books, people have to know who you are, or at least what your books are, and where they are.  These days, whether you’re self-published or traditionally published, or with a ‘small press’, paperback, hardback or E-book,  the problem...