If you read my post for October, #7 – Looking Forward to NaNoWriMo, you will know that I signed up for NaNoWriMo, the annual writer’s 30-day challenge that runs from 1st to 30th November. I can tell you now that I made the target. I wrote 50,000 words in 30 days. 50,435 to be exact. […]
Harry’s Blog
#7 – Looking Forward to NaNoWriMo
Ever since I came across NaNoWriMo, the month of November has taken on a new image for me. It used to be a 30-day slog of dark, damp mornings with stubbornly misted windscreens, and crawling traffic jams under brooding skies that insisted on drizzling their payload throughout the entire day. Then I discovered that deep […]
#6 – Creativity vs Structure In Your Writing
Writing is an art. It’s fun. It flows effortlessly from the depths of your creative well. All you need do is show up and wait, with pen in hand or fingers poised over the keyboard, and the sacred Muse will wake from its slumber and guide beautiful words through your veins, to cascade gracefully onto […]
#5 – Engage With Your Characters
I love the idea of setting my characters loose to figure out the storyline themselves, while I sit at my laptop, fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to type furiously when the action starts. Alas, whenever I’ve employed this tactic, very little has happened. So recently I decided to try something a little different. Instead […]
#4 – Be Prepared When You Sit Down to Write
From a writing perspective, July was a reasonably good month for me. If you read my blog post earlier this month entitled ‘Reboot Your Writing‘, you will know that I was very disappointed with my progress in June. Since that post on 4th of July, I’ve kept a record of my Words Per Day on […]
#3 – Reboot Your Writing
The Symptoms Wow, it’s the last day of June already, and if I’m honest, I’ve very little to show for it from a writing point of view. OK, I’ll be specific – I wrote a total of 821 words in June. As I say that, my mind pops up numerous reasons why this happened, but […]
#2 – Compiling an eBook to mobi using Scrivener and Calibre
Earlier this year I was finally ready to self-publish my first book, Hard Choices. I had used Scrivener for writing the manuscript and thought that the publishing process would involve a couple of clicks before uploading the appropriate file to Amazon. I was frustratingly disappointed. First, let me say that Scrivener is great. I’ve used […]
#1 – Find images for your book cover, website and social media posts
I’ve been writing on and off over the past four years and managed to finish a novella in January 2016. I spent much of last summer listening to podcasts and videos by established authors like Joanna Penn and David Mitchell, and by October I was encouraged to self publish my own work. Part of this […]