Category: Blog

There’s so much to do here, just now, away from the keyboard. We’re going on holiday soon, so I’m gearing up for that We’ve just moved a caravan from in front of the house that’s been in situ for years. The land underneath – right by the front door – needs sorting out, now Herbalism…

There’s something difficult about the current stage of my editing process and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. I wouldn’t even know about it, but for the fact that I haven’t sat down to work on it for three days, and today, when I finally have, I find myself feeling unusually…

The key item I’ve been working on this morning, in checking for consistency, is the capitalisation of the four compass directions. Should they be capitalised? No, unless they’re being used as proper nouns, as in Easterly Street. I was obviously unsure about this when writing the first draft, as I was over the place on…

I forgot to mention my 66 point edit list yesterday. Well, it’s now a 68 point edit list. This morning, I’ve been checking the ellipses. Should they have two dots? .. Three? … Four or more? ……… What about when we tease towards a question or exclamation mark….? ..? ……..! The answer is three. Always…

I’m happy with it and – now that I’ve worked through it – I’m feeling a lot happier about the ending of book 3, as well. It’s not a cliffhanger, and maybe we don’t need a fourth book, after all. I’m still not sure about that. I’ll see how the first three are received and…

This is a very detailed editing process of all three books, which has taken me nine months, so far, in total. I’m not working on it full-time, though. I doubt I could do that, when the two hours a day that I do makes my shoulders burn and my legs restless. I don’t know how…

Even though History Maps was always intended to be a trilogy, I’m realising that the ending to book 3, AI, is something of a cliffhanger. I wasn’t supposed to be, in fact, I had no idea, when writing, how the story would end. That’s not quite true. I’ve explained before, how creative writing seems to…

Because – hands up – someone who has been close to me for much of my life, probably has it. I’m not saying who, or even divulging their gender, but the way they are has caused huge problems for me. The NPD character in my books is not based on this person. She is just…

There’s a bit of an ASMR element to my early morning editing sessions. The room is quiet, apart from the ticking of a clock. I move the wooden chair on the wooden floor. It creaks, always the same sound. I click on the overhead, ancient, anglepoise lamp, by queezing the button inside the shade, on…

Please can we have an alternative text form, than normal, bold and italics? Backwards italics, maybe? A quick search tells me that they do exist, but not in most ordinary fonts of the kind that will work on Amazon’s Kindle or other eReaders. Why do I need one? Oh, it’s the voices again. I’ve got…