Six Common Writing Excuses (And How to Overcome Them)

November 22, 2011

Image from Flickr by lowjumpingfrog I promised I’d share some of what I learnt at BlogWorld, which took place from 3rd – 5th November. It was a fantastic three days packed with great teaching and awesome friends. Most of the session I went to weren’t very on-topic for writers (they covered things like webinars and [...]

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The Best Thing I’ve Ever Written (Now Available…)

November 17, 2011

You might have noticed that I’ve been a bit quiet recently. I was away at BlogWorld (and had a blast!) and I’ve also been busy putting the finishing touches to my novel, Lycopolis. This novel has been over three years in the making. It’s gone through seven drafts. Dozens of people have helped me along the [...]

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The Digitalisation of Reading (and Writing)

October 24, 2011

Image from Flickr by Poldavo (Alex) Computers are changing the way we read – and the way we write. Paper books and publications tend to belong to one reader (though some are held in libraries). They’re damaged by annotations (if someone scribbles on your newspaper, they’re spoiling the reading experience for you). But digital texts are [...]

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I’m Speaking at BlogWorld Expo – Are You Coming?

October 14, 2011

One of the highlights of my (admittedly nerdy) calendar is BlogWorld Expo. It’s a conference about blogging and all things social media … and it’s full of people like me. Yeah, that might well put off anyone normal – but as I’ve mentioned before, writers aren’t normal. Last year, I had a blast as a [...]

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Should You Get a Kindle if You’re a Book-Lover?

October 11, 2011

I love books. Always have done. I could read before I started school (thanks to my mum!) – and I spent my childhood and early teens with my nose in a book. At university, I studied English literature for three wonderful years. And when I got married, we had our wedding reception in the Bodleian [...]

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I’m Back! And Here’s What I Read On Holiday…

October 4, 2011

I’ve been back in England for a week, enjoying unseasonably warm weather! I had a wonderful time travelling round Europe with my husband, Paul. We went to: Bucharest and Brasov, in Romania Budapest in Hungary Vienna in Austria Venice and Rome in Italy We saw lots of wonderful buildings, ate fantastic food, and got to [...]

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No Posts During September (But I’ll Be Back…)

September 7, 2011

I’m going to be away for the rest of September, travelling round Europe (Bucharest, Brasov, Budapest, Vienna, Venice and Rome!) I’ll have sporadic internet access, but I won’t be blogging. I will, however, be sending out newsletters. Yay! So … if you’re not already on the Aliventures newsletter, I highly recommend joining up now. We’ve [...]

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Extra Reading for August: Five of my Recent Guest Posts

August 24, 2011

I’ve been busy guest-posting again this month, so here’s some extra reading that you might enjoy… #1: How to Improve Your Writing Skills by Analyzing Structure on Men with Pens This is a hefty guest post where I dig deep into an ebook and a blog post to demonstrate how to pull apart structures (and [...]

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Three Indie Author / Self-Publishing Ebooks – Reviewed

August 16, 2011

A few months ago, I wrote about why I’m planning to self-publish my novel, Lycopolis, as both an ebook and a paperback. (More on that in a couple of months!) The ebook world has moved incredibly fast over the past year, and there are more and more self-publishing success stories every day. It’s an exciting [...]

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Should You Be Writing Shorter Sentences?

August 11, 2011

Last week, I tackled shorter paragraphs. Today, I want to take a look at sentences. Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, sentence length matters. Short, snappy sentences (or even sentence fragments) create a very different effect from long, complex, thoughtful sentences. In school, you were probably told that every sentence should contain a verb. This [...]

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