Once upon a time, when I was still living with my parents, a frequent Saturday morning activity was the completion of the weekend general knowledge crossword. Me and my dad would scrabble through an entire bookshelf full of reference books to figure out the answers and gleefully write them in. We would consult encyclopedic dictionaries, … Continue reading The sad demise of reference books
Once upon a time it seemed as though I had hours and hours a day in which to read. I devoured books at an impressive rate. Although I'm not a particularly fast reader, I made up for it in sheer number of hours devoted to the cause. But that was before I started writing in the evenings, … Continue reading How reviews influence my choice of books
Oh my, the debate about writers and platform expectations is still raging. Over the past couple of days I've spent hours knee-deep in blog posts and reader comments, my little introvert heart pounding with apprehension. (Hours not writing, I might add...) Rachelle Gardner's post on Wednesday talked about the need to quantify the size of … Continue reading More on writers and platform pressure
Today I'm going to muse on a topic that has been floating around the writing industry blogosphere the past week or so -- which is what writers get out of blogging and how big a 'platform' novelists need in order to sell books (or to even be considered for publication by the larger publishers). Anne R Allen … Continue reading What I get out of blogging
It is an unequivocal truth that novels do not write themselves. Irrespective of how many words a writer can produce in an hour, or how many hours in a day (or even a week) can be made available to write, the fact remains that every single word and every single minute counts. Today I am mostly concerned … Continue reading On writing & discipline
Last week I stumbled upon Anne R. Allen's Blog and she has some incredibly sensible things to say about writers and blogging. Her series of posts on blogging (highlighted in her side bar) covers tips on content, search-engine optimisation, pitfalls to avoid . . . and how to attract readers. Highly recommended reading. On the … Continue reading Good advice
These days a great many writing resources -- particularly in the form of blogs -- can be found on the Interwebs. There are blogging agents, blogging editors, blogging authors, not to mention blogging aspirants, by the bucketload. These blogs all take different forms: some are instructional, filled with great advice; others contain well thought-out essays on aspects of genre; many are … Continue reading Lure of the blog maze
How did writers ever survive without the Interwebs? Its merits must surely rank a thousand-fold -- but there is one in particular that has inspired today's post. Research. Back in the pre-Internet days, writers must have spent a cursed lot of time in libraries, or writing letters to people to inquire about areas of specialist … Continue reading All hail the Interwebs
E V Gregory 