Authors Electric

It's the most wonderful time of the year when, baby, it's cold outside, and Jack Frost is nipping at your nose. Yep, it's Christmas, Yuletide, Winter Solstice. And what better way to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, Prince of Peace, champion of the poor and oppressed, than engaging in a heartwarming celebration of gross materialism? With that in mind, I am here to give you a couple of last minute gift ideas for that writer in your life. 1.  Book Cover Design Secrets You Can Use to Sell More Books by Derek Murphy  Writers love books, or at least they should, otherwise, they are in the wrong business. Here's a book about book design for independent writers. There are a plethora of books out there about writing, but not as many about designing covers, which is a shame, because despite adages about judging books and covers, a well designed cover can be the major selling point for an author, especially for readers unfamiliar with the author's work. I bou...

The lengths we go to to simulate working! When I was a lad, DA stood for District Attorney on US TV shows and Duck’s Arse in barber shops. (For younger readers, I should explain that a DA was the back bit of a Tony Curtis, where the hair was swept back on each side to meet in the middle of your occiput.) The reason I’m telling you all this is that the illustration represents my latest displacement activity (which I’ll now call DA to save time). We all have DAs, but the essence of a really good one is that it pretends not to be. It gives you the impression that you’re not wasting time but actually working. The best ones even manage to go a bit further – with them, you’re not only working, you’re working on whatever it is the DA is helping you to avoid. In this instance, not only have I spent a pleasant half hour creating the table represented here, I’m now spending more time explaining it to some imagined readers, which is a sort of ne plus ultra DA in that it’s not only a DA i...

Scrivener for Windows or Mac http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php      In March of this year, I wrote a post for Authors Electric called Discovering Scrivener, and in order to refresh your memory, if you click here, you can read it again.      When I started using this software program, I was in the middle of writing Missing Believed Dead , and I did wonder what effect it would have on the finished book. I’m a pantster, you see, not a plotter. I usually start with a scene and a character, then I play the what if game to see where the story goes. So, much of what I write is as big a surprise to me as it is to the reader. I like to think that if I don’t know whodunnit until I’m nearly at the end of the book, then it will be all the more difficult for the reader to guess.      Anyway my type of writing doesn’t lend itself easily to organisational tools and software, which is exactly what Scrivener is, an...

          I n my last blog, I suggested that it was time I stopped faffing around and got on with some proper writing.  So I’ve done just that and have now passed (I hope) the point of no return with The Second Man From Porlock ,  my latest attempt  to  get the  old, failed novel about Samuel Taylor Coleridge right at last and out of my system.   STC.   The man himself           Trying to write novels centred round real people presents many difficulties.  They aren’t biographies: conversely, they ca n’t be pure fiction.   It takes a braver writer than I am to dare even to think of writing a book like  Milton in America , Peter Ackroyd’s wonderful ‘What if?’ novel, which turns what might well have been Milton’s fate into something which actually happens.   This makes for a stunning piece of literary and historical understanding, not ...

Chris Longmuir A recent post by Mark Chisnell mentioned how impressed he was with Scrivener, the software developed specifically for writers. It generated quite a bit of interest so I thought I would expand on this by giving you my impressions of working with Scrivener. However, it’s important to understand that I’m no Scrivener expert, so don’t expect too much, plus I don’t intend to give you a tutorial on how to work with Scrivener. What I will do is tell you about the bits I like. I discovered Scrivener in 2012, and I was curious, so I checked out the web site of Literature and Latte , which is where you will find everything related to Scrivener. Although it was developed for Mac computers it is also available for Windows on the PC. I checked out the Case Studies, read the Testimonials, and watched the Videos. Then being the technology geek that I am, I downloaded the trial. Scrivener has an excellent tutorial which they advise you to work through first, and believe me,...