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!

Is your protagonist confused?

I may have mentioned this before, but I am a big fan of protagonists with dubious character traits. There is something about a blurry line that adds flavour to their character depth. In fact, if the protagonist was to stop and consider themselves, they would be firmly on the wrong side of that invisible virtuous line.

So in short—I like my protagonist confused.

So here is an interesting analogy to help in the confused protagonist debate: If you are the kind of person who goes to the gym 5 days a week, then going 5 days a week is no big thing. BUT, if you struggle to go once a week, then 5 days in a row is a pretty impressive feat. And so with our protagonist. The more reluctant they are, the more doing something good or heroic chafes, the more interesting it is when they are finally forced to comply.

As a reader, the more confused you are about the protagonist, the more the tension grows. Will they do the right thing? Are they capable of doing the right thing even?

And what about our antagonist? Are they wholly bad? Do they have redeeming qualities? Do you empathise with them at any point in the book? Perhaps their behaviour has been abhorrent, and then you discover a terrible secret about their past that casts new questions onto everything they have so far done.

There is a certain fascination with a good guy, who is far removed from being good. And likewise with a bad guy who is not completely bad.

Mars—the only known planet inhabited solely by robots

I saw this picture today,  of the real life Wall-E out on Mars. Curiosity, has been busy doing his thing, in a surprisingly similar way to his fictitious counterpart, made famous by Disney Pixar. If a robot could look happy, I would say Curiosity was looking pretty damn happy right now. There is also a little bit of pride—look at me—the picture seems to say.

It struck me as a lonely life, if a robot could have such a feeling, but an industrious life all the same. Curiosity isn’t completely alone though, he has a few redundant friends such as Opportunity and Spirit, who also reside on Martian land, but there are no people, making Mars, as far as we know, the only planet to be inhabited solely by robots.

Below, Opportunity takes a shadow selfie. Those rovers know how to mix-it-up!

There is something quintessentially human, about these robot selfies taken on Mars, and it is the nature of humans that we place our emotional nuances on unemotional objects, such as cute robot rovers.

Picture Source: Mars Exploration Rovers

Source Article: Curiosity takes a ‘belly selfie’ on Mars

Interesting fact about the picture: The Curiosity selfie is actually 92 pictures stitched together to remove the tell-tale, outstretched, selfie arm. Clever robot! aka NASA engineers 😉

Love Sci-fi and fantasy fiction? Love the Anti-hero?

Get Divided Serenity out now on all Amazon stores, and free with Kindle Unlimited.

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

The fear of losing your imagination

Everyone has something they consider to be their special gift. Maybe it is something you acknowledge privately, or something that everyone knows. Perhaps you are a great communicator, a loving mother, possess green-fingers, or something else.

I consider my imagination to be my special gift. Not that I think I am an amazing writer, or in someway uniquely gifted in this respect. It is more that I cannot imagine what life would be like without my imagination.

Our mind is a complex creation, filled with nuances and influences, hopes and aspirations. We feed it every second of our waking day, and give it freedom to flow unfretted every night.

But is this gift forever? Can we count on the way that it works now, to always be the same?

Sometimes I wonder if my imagination will abandon me. If I will sit down to write a chapter and get it a terrifying blank. I fear this; really fear this. What if I run out of ideas? What it my enthusiasm flat-lines?

So far this has never happened, and it is always waiting for me in whatever capacity I need.

I truly hope my imagination never leaves me, because it is something that I love, and I know that if it left me, I would miss it very much.

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

Via Someecards

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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