Category: Blog

  • The slow grind

    I did some thinking exercises this week, designed to improve my editing productivity. So far, I’ve made milk kefir, kombucha, kimchee and sauerkraut. I have been harvesting vegetables from the garden and batch-cooking with them for the freezer. I’ve been drying and processing herbs and flowers and making various brews and concoctions, filling teabags and…

  • I started a sentence with the word “Observationally”.

    Started a paragraph with it actually, to my eternal shame. (Para 3, Chapter 2, Book 1, to be precise.) Don’t worry. It’s gone, now.

  • Back to the beginning again

    Starting another round of editing, my heart wasn’t in it. Five or six days passed, without me doing any work whatsoever. *Checks date of last blog post..* Okay, two weeks passed. The very thought of tackling yet more editing was depressing. I had to do something different, switch it up, make it interesting for me…

  • Distractions, distractions

    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…

  • Something difficult

    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…

  • At least the compass points east

    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…

  • Checking for consistency

    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…

  • The detailed edit is finished

    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…

  • I’ve nearly finished editing book 3: AI

    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…

  • I think there’s going to have to be a fourth book

    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…