About a year ago I posted about my own experience finding inspiration in the places I visit: Have travel, Will write. That was at the height of the pandemic, when traveling was still a distant vision. But by this spring, my wanderlust was suffering severe withdrawal symptoms. One trip to Italy last September hardly qualified… Continue reading Finding inspiration in the simple things
Tag: indie authors
Tackling the second novel. From climbing a hill to scaling a mountain.
Image by Pixel2013, Pixabay Writing a book is hard work. I didn’t realize how hard until I started writing my second one. Writing my first book was fairly easy – like walking up a steep hill and slipping and falling a few times along the way. But that was all right, because no one was… Continue reading Tackling the second novel. From climbing a hill to scaling a mountain.
My author interview on March 19, 2022, courtesy of author Jill Piscitello
https://jillpiscitello.com/ INTERVIEW: What was the inspiration behind your latest release? The idea for the story came from a series I wrote in my late twenties. In between caring for my daughter and helping my husband in his business, I wrote several novellas set in a vacation resort on a tropical island. It was superficial, frivolous… Continue reading My author interview on March 19, 2022, courtesy of author Jill Piscitello
An Unexpected Visitor
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
Fields of Poppies and Other Childhood Memories
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
A Home For Misty
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
Things I Wish I Knew Before Writing a Book
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
What type of reader are you?
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?
The Elusive Plot
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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Christmas in July
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
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