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Is Zoe me?
In a word, no. Okay, there are big similarities. I can see why the question would be asked. We’re both middle aged, both mothers. Yes, we both home educated our children. Is that it? Er, no. There’s more. We both live in a Northern town, we’re both interested in History… We both want to see…
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Writing. A risky business?
I think I’ve spent about 400 hours on this trilogy, so far. I’ll spend many more on getting it published and then selling it. I guess that’s only the equivalent of ten weeks, though, at a full-time job. I certainly haven’t been working on it full-time and – other commitments being what they are –…
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On commas and abbreviations
I wrote draft #1 without much thought about grammar, punctuation or – most especially – commas and abbreviations. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but we tend not to use them much in speech nowadays. We can cheerfully write whole sentences and paragraphs without feeling the need to invoke that little item divider at all.…
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The voices
My History Maps books have two distinct voices, outside of the characters’ spoken words. The narrative voice tells you what’s happening, and the contemplative voice – usually in italics – contains some of Zoe’s thoughts, word for word. But it was not ever thus. The first draft was far more messy, because I was writing…
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How to start a blog. First, build your site.
Reaching a certain, nit-picking stage in editing the book, I realise I should be blogging around now, if not, six months ago. Well actually, three years ago. But, as I didn’t then, it has to be now. To host a blog, you need a website and I didn’t have one. The decision to get one…