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Time Dilation is Not a Writer’s Friend

G’day mates. It’s a bright and sunny winter’s morning as I write, Independence Day in the US, and just another gorgeous 5th July here in Australia. Since I’ve been neglecting my readers lately, I thought I’d throw in a simple update on my writing life just to keep things moving along. My head has been [...]

Starting a New Novel

Where do you get your ideas? Although no-one has ever asked me, I thought I’d answer the question anyway. I’ve just started writing a new book – a new trilogy in fact – and I’ve been watching myself as the process of coming up with the story unfolds. And this is how it happened. Almost [...]

Top 5 Tips for Authors Doing Radio Interviews

Fresh from my first ever web radio interview, I am now a world expert. (You can see just how expert I am at this by downloading the MP3 recording of the show I did yesterday with the lovely Nanci Arvizu, who does the Page Readers show on BlogTalkRadio.) And, on the basis of this extensive [...]

Top 10 Book Promotion Tactics

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they [...]

A Writing Tip

I now have the galleys of my novel TimeSplash and they have prompted me to say this to all aspiring novellists. When you write a novel, make sure it is as rich, deep and subtle as you can possibly make it. Make all the characters complex and interesting, in fact, make them fascinating. Make sure [...]

Crowds of Eyeballs

My perception of the Web has changed. I used to think it was full of people like me, ordinary folk, going about their business, finding things that interested them, chatting to friends and acquaintances, but I was wrong. Oh, there may be such people – millions of them – but they don’t really matter. What [...]

I Learn by Going

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go. (from ‘The Waking‘ by Theodore Roethke.) Writing is a strange business. Last night I killed my babies. I woke at about 3 am, drenched in sweat, even though it was cool. My head was full of purpose. [...]

Just You Wait ‘Enry ‘Iggins

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a [...]

Revealing My Obsessions

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t [...]

300

No, not a post about the Battle of Thermopylae just a few comments on building up a following on Twitter. Yesterday, you see, I had 300 ‘followers’ for the first time. Unlike King Leonidas, I won’t ask my gallant band to give their lives in a hopeless rearguard action against the armies of the Persian [...]