Image by Katerina Kerdi, Unsplash Taking a page from an article I read on The Writer blog: Resurrect your darlings: How to recycle deleted material from your manuscript, I decided to ‘resurrect’ some of my deleted material from the original MISTY DREAMS draft and post it here. This is the second in the series. For… Continue reading An Unexpected Visitor
How many times do we come across an image that reminds us of something we experienced in the past? Imagine a vast green field scattered with bright red poppies as far as the eye can see. It may sound unoriginal and travelblog-ish, perhaps, but for me it has great meaning. Poppies represent one of the… Continue reading Fields of Poppies and Other Childhood Memories
This month’s post is a piece I deleted from the first draft of my book Misty Dreams. For those of you who have read my book and have heard my story of how the first draft turned out to be a massive 360,000 words, this is one of the many scenes I regretfully had to… Continue reading A Home For Misty
Photo: Artem_Apukhtin from Pixabay There are so many things I was unaware of when I started writing my romance novel, things that would have saved me a lot of time. But at the time I was writing for my own enjoyment. Not that I didn’t aspire to become a published author; I just didn’t think… Continue reading Things I Wish I Knew Before Writing a Book
Photo from Pexels I often wonder if other readers are as volatile as me when it comes to reading habits. Are you a multi-task reader, the type who likes to read more than one book at a time or a single task reader, preferring to read one book at a time? Are you adventurous, the… Continue reading What type of reader are you?
How many authors or aspiring authors have a pile of unfinished manuscripts stacked in a drawer or on their computers? How many of them were so sure each one of these would be their best work yet, only to lose interest after a few thousand words?
I’m in danger of becoming one of those. A serial discarder. A quitter.
Experts say it’s hard to get back to writing fiction when you’ve been away from it for some time. In my experience, I find that the opposite is also true. I spent so many years writing the same book and now that it’s finally published and I’m ready to move on to my next one, I find that it’s more difficult than I had anticipated. I’ve been hit with the infamous writer’s block. My problem, though, isn’t not being able to write; it’s not liking what I write…
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Okay, this title has nothing to do with this article, but I couldn’t resist using it, even though it’s August. Every time I hear this expression I’m reminded of my Christmases in South Africa, where the seasons were topsy-turvy and a ‘white Christmas’ was some ridiculous idealistic illusion we compensated for by ‘dressing’ the branches… Continue reading Christmas in July
Photo by Dominika Roseclay from Pexels Ever since I was a little girl I have loved traveling to new places. I believe traveling and living in different parts of the world has helped shape me and my writing and impacted the way I see the world. Family outings and vacations were always a source of… Continue reading Have Travel, Will Write
People sometimes ask me what inspired me to write Misty Dreams. My response is always: my characters. Richard and Clare came to life long before the plot was even conceived. The story evolved around them as I wrote it. It was my first attempt at a full-sized novel, and I had no concept of how… Continue reading How Misty Dreams came to be
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