Authors Electric

Just to clarify things, these are my favourite, or at least most frequent writing mistakes. If I started on the other mistakes I’ve made over the course of my life, it would turn into a book and would be entitled ‘What Was She Thinking?’, my preferred title for an autobiography. I present the top five list here in no particular order.                  1.      Every day a Tuesday Not usually a month of Sundays but sometimes several Mondays one after the other, or a very long week at work for my characters, with no weekend to look forward to at the end of it. This kind of thing often strikes me when I do the very first read-through after getting to the end of a draft, and it’s why I write down a chapter-by-chapter outline at this stage and add the day of the week to each chapter heading, trying to iron out discrepancies as I go along.   2.      Overuse of gestures / facial expressions ...

'I SAID, NO PINK BITS, NO SWEARING, NO VIOLENCE, NO AMERICANISMS, NO LANGUAGE!' Last month, I blogged about swearing. It was mostly funny, though I was making a serious point about customers/readers being ‘gatekeepers’ now in Ebookworld (good), and some of them using their reviews as weapons of moral warfare to make authors toe the line (not so good). If you’ve not read the post, pop over and check it out HERE . Welcome back! Well this month I’m blogging about a related phenomenon. Readers pointing out and punishing author errors - or are they errors? I’ve a tootsie in both camps here, in the sense that I’m a right cleverclogs and tend to spot errors of fact, grammar, plot and procedure in other peoples’ books, although I write my own. I can’t help it. Because I do tend to notice errors, I try really really hard to avoid them in my books, especially my crime fiction. I do a lot of research and a lot of checking. My new crime novel THE OPERATOR (BRUCE AND BENNETT ...