Something a little different

I am not much of a sporting fan, but an opportunity to watch the Australian Rules football from the rather civilised vantage of the presidents suite at Perth’s Subiaco Oval, was at least partially appealing. I had fun, and sometimes it is good to do something a little different. The home team won by a whopping 54 points and so it was a great atmosphere at the stadium 🙂

It has been a mixed weekend weather-wise. We are just heading into spring, and it has alternated between brilliant sunshine and torrential rain. My garden has turned into a jungle in a very short space of time, and so I decided to tackle a bit of tidy up around the house.

Below is the before shot. Yep, a bit of a mess!

My cat, Ted, helping in his usual way…

All that rain and sunshine has helped my plants, very healthy, aka a jungle!

And just to show that I can tidy up—sort of—here are the after shots.

And in between gardening and football, I started and finished a fairly hefty scifi book. The Last Praetorian – book review

Happy reading!

An Author on Growing Through Criticism

Great points 🙂

readers+writers journal

 Three Uncomfortable Lessons about Criticism I Learned from Publishing my Book

By Mars Dorian, {grow} Contributing Columnist

I have a new baby.
It’s about two months old, has a compelling name and is loved by me, my family, and close friends. Of course I’m talking about the new sci-fi novel, Fear The Liberator: A Space Opera Novel, I self-published on Amazon. I worked sweats and fears on that darling, had a professional editor and published it with the best intentions.

And for a while, it was good. Sales trickled in, up to 16 per day, as well as many burrows.

I was high-fiving the universe after having launched a book that finally didn’t tank like my two previous books. And then, the first one-star review crept in and vaporized my book like an orbital beam cannon. The critic wrote a 700 word long review that lynched every part of…

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Editing/Proofreading Tips for Indie Authors

Nice self editing tips 🙂

Cassidy's Bookshelves

As an indie author, you are responsible for the entire publishing process – writing, editing, proofreading, publishing, and marketing. But that doesn’t mean that you should do it all yourself. Even if you are working with a low or almost non-existent budget, make sure that you get someone else to participate in the editing process – someone that has editing experience and who won’t be shy about pointing out problems in your manuscript. Your editor can be a paid professional editor or a qualified and capable friend.  You should never unleash your masterpiece on the world without having it properly edited.

Before you submit your work to your editor, make every effort to  weed out as many of the errors in your manuscript as possible. Eliminating simple typos, extra spaces, and so on, will make it easier for your editor to focus on the story flow, the wording, and the important stuff that you simply don’t see because you are…

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Writing Problems

What happens when…

Well, the above photo demonstrates what happens when you put two chairs with nice soft cushions out, and then don’t sit down quickly enough!

It’s supposed to be winter here, but it’s been a beautiful weekend with glorious blue sky and a very respectable 27 degrees. So, I thought I would sit out and enjoy the warmth while reading on my kindle. And being a softy I went and got another chair and left the cats where they were 😉

Rather disappointingly I thought I had bought ‘Planet of Exiles’ by Ursula Le Guin, but it turned out to be on pre-order so I will have to wait until September. That will teach me not to read properly before hitting the ‘buy’! So in the absence of that I tucked into some old school sci-fi.

Happy reading!

I’m a bookaholic

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Indie Success –10 things that really matter

Realising a dream 🙂

Sue Vincent's Daily Echo

Hans Christian Andersen by Anne Grahame Johnstone

There are a lot of articles and reports out there giving various and often conflicting figures about the Indie book market. All seem to agree, however, that the percentage of Indie writers and publishers is huge and growing. You only have to read a few Indie books to realise there is some seriously good stuff out there and marvel at the ingenuity and diversity of the imaginations from which they were born.

Yet there is still a stigma attached to independently published work. There are those, it is true, who see it only as a way to make a fast buck and churn out little more than rubbish. These are not writers in my opinion and it is not of their books I speak, they are little more than opportunists; marketeers who, seeing a potentially lucrative product churn out a cheap imitation that…

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If you only read

The 10 Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels of 2015 So Far

Nice list of scifi fantasy reads for fans of the genre 🙂

The 10 Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels of 2015 So Far

Are we there yet? #WhatNotToSayToAWriter

Ah, enough said 😉

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