Category Archives: Writing

Long-overdue ebook availability update

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in ereading, Libraries, Writing

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It has been a while since I’ve looked at the total number of ebooks and audiobooks available in our library’s OverDrive system. Over a year, in fact! The figures are encouraging, though:

Audio fiction Audio non-fiction Ebook fiction Ebook non-fiction Total
December 2010 4,202 1,060 1,185 139 6,586
February 2011 4,534 1,089 3,297 505 9,425
August 2011 5,197 1,139 5,773 880 12,989
January 2012 6,271 1,208 11,560 1,543 20,582
April 2013 6,999 1,516 20,281 3,410 32,206

The growth is clearly in the ebooks, rather than audio books, which is unsurprising, as audiobooks are generally a lot more expensive.

I’m still very much a hybrid reader but do prefer to read books as ebooks if I have the option. When I read physical books I miss the option of tapping on a word to find out its meaning or of increasing the size of the text when I’m reading in low light levels or when my eyes are tired.

I recently re-read my own two books and found a few editing errors in both. Those have now been fixed. I’m working on a third Hawley Lodge book (with more of an historical angle to it) – but progress is slow due to a lot of other commitments at the moment. Watch this space!

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Mapping the writing process

07 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by in Indie writing, Software, Writing

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I had a vague overall idea about what I wanted to happen in The Viking and the Vendetta, but that was it: I let the book evolve as I was writing, relying on ideas to crop up when I needed them to. This is the brass-rubbing technique of writing I’ve described before. I did feel a little frightened when I’d finished the penultimate chapter but still had no clear idea about what was going to happen in the final one. I knew that certain things needed to happen, I just wasn’t sure how they would unfold. This has happened before, though, so I was hopeful that I’d be able to come up with the answers eventually.

After a good night’s sleep I woke up and started having ideas. I’m sure that my unconscious mind was working away on the problem as I slept. The final 3,500 words of the book poured out of me and onto the keyboard in one glorious day, quite often surprising me in the direction they took.

I don’t do a lot of on-paper planning of what is going to happen in my stories, but I do keep a digital mind-map of the writing process. This is divided into sections, one for each group of three chapters. I make a note of the main scenes of each chapter: sometimes after I’ve written, but other times beforehand, when I know what needs to happen but haven’t got round to writing it yet. It starts off as a fairly simple mind map, but ends up looking like a dog’s dinner:

Viking and Vendetta mind map

There are a few notes at the top left about important aspects of the story, but the rest is just a chapter-by-chapter summary of the work-in-progress, marked off with a green tick when the chapter is completed. I also make a note of how many words are in each chapter, so that they’re approximately the same length, give or take 500 words. For these books, the chapter length seems to have settled at around 3,250 words. It just happened that way; I’m not sure that there’s an optimum word length for chapters.

I did something similar with The Roman and the Runaway, but that one was a lot simpler and I didn’t use it as consistently as I did with the second book. It stops at Chapter 11 and the name of the main female character was still Connie when I last updated it, not Pagan as she became a bit later.

Roman and Runaway mind map

The software I use for these maps is Freemind. Which, as the name suggests, is free. I’m sure there are more sophisticated tools out there, but this one works very well for my novel-mapping purposes.

Exciting news

31 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in epublishing, Writing

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It’s been very quiet around this blog recently, mostly because I’ve been busy on the sequel to The Roman and the Runaway. I hoped to finish it in 2011 and I’ve actually managed to do that, thanks to some free time over the Christmas break and a last-minute flood of ideas for the final chapter.

You can find the ebook at Smashwords – where you can get 20% as a sample, or buy the whole thing for $2.99. It’s also available at Amazon’s UK Kindle store and in the US. Thanks to Brenda, a Flickr user, for making the image of the knife available under a Creative Commons licence. I think it makes a great cover.

Happy New Year!

Pink Snowbunnies in Hell (and Amazon…and Smashwords)

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in epublishing, Indie writing, Writers, Writing

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Back in May, author Debora Geary put out a challenge on a Kindleboards forum, asking whether people would be interested in contributing a story of under 1,000 words to an anthology. The story had to contain the line ‘pink snowbunnies will ski in Hell’ in it, but other than that, anything went.

The resulting publication (which had a cover before any content) is now available for sale at Amazon and Smashwords. It’s interesting to see how the different authors interpreted this brief (for me it was a chance to dip my toe into ‘light romance’ territory…). All proceeds are going to animal shelter charities and there are chances to win free copies over at Jimi Ripley, Coral Moore, Rex Jameson, Nicole Chase and Barbara Annino’s sites.

E-editing

30 Sunday Jan 2011

Posted by in Editing, ereading, Writing

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E-editing

I’m enjoying my ereader very much – it’s such a comfortable and easy way to read. One way I’m using it which I hadn’t anticipated is as an editing device. I’m slowly working on The Viking and the Vendetta, when I have time. I’ve written about half the book, so far. The other week, I converted the Word file into epub format and started to read the work-in-progress on my ereader. I soon found that it was much more pleasurable than trying to read the book on a computer screen (as is the case with every other ebook, so of course it was!).

The ability to make notes on the ereader makes it even more useful. When I notice something that needs changing, I can insert a note and then, when I’m back at the computer, I can go through the file, note by note, and make the alterations to the master Word document. The limitations of the stylus and on-screen keyboard mean that I won’t be making major additions to the book using this method, but it is great as a line-editing device.

It’s interesting that having an ereader is changing the way I write as well as the way I read!

A tale of two semi-autobiographical novels

12 Wednesday Jan 2011

Posted by in 'Show me the free' challenge, Reviews, Websites, Writing

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Hm, that title doesn’t roll off the tongue too well, does it?

One of the wonderful things about getting an ereader is the availability of out-of-print classic books. Project Gutenberg is a good source, but you can also find them at places like Feedbooks, Open Library, the Mobileread site and ManyBooks. It’s a chance to catch up on reading all those books that you feel you really should have read, but haven’t.

This month, I’ve read two books from Project Gutenberg which, on the face of it, might be thought of as quite similar. Tom Brown’s Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes, was published in 1857 and tells of the experiences of a Rubgy School student. David Copperfield was first published as a book in 1850 and follows the life of a young author, including his days at school in Canterbury. In both books, the character of the boys’ headmaster is an important one.

If I had not looked up the dates of publication, I would have said that the Hughes book was much older than the Dickens one. Its style and content is more formal, more didactic, more moralistic and much less enjoyable to read. Then I thought perhaps it was a difference in the age of the authors, but no: they were both in their thirties when their respective books were published. I’m not at all surprised that Dickens was so popular during his lifetime, and continues to be so today, while Hughes remains relatively unknown. It seems that Hughes was well aware of my concerns with his book, as he said (according to Wikipedia):

Several persons, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, while saying very kind things about this book, have added, that the great fault of it is ‘too much preaching’; but they hope I shall amend in this matter should I ever write again. Now this I most distinctly decline to do. Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to amuse people? I think not. At any rate, I wouldn’t do so myself.

I think Hughes missed an opportunity here. If he’d made his book more enjoyable to read, then he could have got his message across to many more people without the necessity of preaching. As it is, I certainly can’t recommend Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

David Copperfield, on the other hand, is gripping, entertaining and often funny. At over 700 pages, it is a long read, but a satisfying one. My suspicion (as always) is that I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t read this particular classic, but just in case that’s not true, this one is a worthy addition to anyone’s free ereading library.

The covers on this page were taken from Open Library. The images are links to the Project Gutenberg versions of the book.

Inspiration

19 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by in Writing

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How did you come up with the idea for your story?

It’s one of those frequently-asked questions that authors soon learn to come up with a pat answer to. I’ve only been asked it twice, to be completely honest, but just in case anyone out there is wondering, here’s the answer I’d give.

The second senior school I went to was a big comprehensive (over 1,100 students), although it only covered pupils aged 11 to 16. If you wanted to stay on after that you had to go to a different school for the last two years of education.

I would say that it was a ‘bog-standard’ rural comprehensive, but that isn’t quite true. For one thing, it’s one of the few schools in England that has its own farm, with cows, sheep, goats and chickens. I never got involved with the farm, as I didn’t join the school until the second year, and only the first year pupils had mandatory Rural Studies lessons. It’s something I rather regret, as I’m now living on a farm! But I digress…

The sparking point for The Roman and the Runaway came when I was in the last year of my time there. I was passing the office of the teacher who was the head of the fifth year. He was in charge of discipline for our year and there were a bunch of boys waiting outside to see him. I presumed they were in some sort of trouble and noticed, with interest, that one of them was the son of the teacher concerned.

I thought how strange it must be, to have an out-of-school relationship with someone who is in a position of authority over you like that. And how awkward for both of them when the son was in trouble at school. That was where the core of the story about Luke and Ned began. I began writing it in the November of that year, once I’d started at my new school, which involved a bus journey from the old one. That bus ride gave me time to think and to start writing.

Plotting

20 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by in Websites, Writing

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A discussion on one of the KindleBoards forums/fora last week caught my eye. The original poster asked whether you need to have a plan before you start writing.

The responses (predictably) ranged from ‘yes I plan everything out in advance’ to ‘plotting kills novels’. Interesting. One of the respondents mentioned the Snowflake method, which I’ve just read up on and which sounds as though it might be useful.

Like most first-time novelists, I didn’t have a well-thought-out plot for The Roman and the Runaway. By the time I got down to writing it in earnest in 2007, I realised that I only had half a novel (part one of the book as it is now). Those were the scenes I had been carrying in my mind for the previous twenty years. It was another year and a half before I got past that road-block and was able to write parts two and three.

My metaphor for the process of writing the last two parts is that it felt like I was doing a brass-rubbing. The story existed but was hidden and I needed to work hard to reveal the details of it, which were revealed, line by line.

I’m working on a sequel when time allows (which is not often!). This story has a central idea and I’ve written a number of scenes (around 17,000 words) but there is, as yet, no detailed plot. I’m comfortable with that, because it’s my hobby and there’s no rush for this story to be finished. I can imagine that if I was writing to deadlines and had a publisher demanding to know where the sequel was, then it would be much more important to have those detailed plans in place and be writing to meet them.

Sounds a lot less fun, though.

Fathers in fiction

27 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by in Writing, YA fiction

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Andrew Martin had an interesting article in The Guardian yesterday, entitled ‘Bringing fathers to book‘. It instantly caught my eye, as the father/son relationship is one of the important themes in The Roman and the Runaway. Martin’s article examines the way in which fathers are portrayed in fiction, arguing that they are usually weak or absent characters. He is going to be presenting a programme on BBC Four on Tuesday 29 June called ‘Disappearing Dad‘ on this topic. Must get a UK-based relative to record it for me…

This is a theme that has been examined quite a lot recently, particularly in the context of Young Adult fiction. And it’s not only the role of fathers that is being pulled apart: mothers in YA books are being scrutinised, too. Julie Just, children’s books editor of The New York Times, published an article in April this year called ‘The Parent Problem in Young Adult Lit‘. There’s been quite a bit of reaction to this piece in the blogosphere. I particularly like Gretchen Kolderup’s response on her Librarified blog (incidentally, what a great name for a blog – lovely design, too). I tend to agree with her. If stories about absent or problem parents are popular with the YA audience, then, well, so what?

Advantages of self-publishing: perpetual beta

02 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Editing, Indie writing, Writing

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Word count

I can’t tell how many revisions of TR&TR I’ve uploaded to Smashwords since last October, but the number is probably going to be similar to the number of revisions on Scribd, which stands at 37. This is one of the biggest advantages of solely publishing in electronic form: it is easy to amend the text. Usually the revisions are minor ones: correcting typos; sorting out the annoying mixture of straight quotes and smart quotes; adding navigation to meet Amazon’s requirements and so on. Other times, the revisions have involved adding new scenes to the story. There are around 2,500 more words in the book now than there were in September 2009 when I first thought I’d finished it!

I’m intermittently working on a sequel to TR&TR. Having the first book in a fluid form means that I can go back and ‘seed’ it with things that might turn out to be significant in the second. I haven’t done a lot of that yet, but it is great to have that option and not to have the first book frozen in time already.

The main disadvantage that I can see is the inability to ever completely ‘let go’. But as it took 24 years to finally get the story into this form, perhaps it isn’t surprising that I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to it yet.