2 boys, 10 years, 10 posts

10 years of facebook posts about the battles, sorry I mean delights, of raising 2 boys… 24 Nov 2010 (age 1 & 2) Andrew’s lesson for today: don’t use Robert’s potty as a hat when you don’t like getting your hair shampooed. 6 July 2011 (age 2 & 3) A bit of muffin caught in…

Glasdrum Chapters 1&2

Chapter One – MEGAN Friday, 6 May 2005, 10.30pm Megan was drinking beer in the kitchen with a few friends when her collie, Glen, ran through the open back door with a muddy stick in his mouth. When he dropped it at her feet, she stared in disgust. It wasn’t a stick; it was a…

Not good enough! Start again. And again.

Book 3 sagas… In the last year I’ve written 80k words of my third book. That’s an average sized manuscript (both my other novels are about 78k words) so I should be celebrating. But unfortunately those 80k words are spread across two different novels, both of which I’m ditching. So no celebrating just yet. I…

Optimism

I published Glasdrum, my second novel, on 1 April 2017. It had taken me about two years to write, and my first novel took me three years. Aha, I thought, a pattern of book-writing efficiency. Logically Book 3 would only take me one year. Nope. Maybe I got the pattern wrong. It’s not 3-2-1, it’s…

The benefits of exhaustion

Blimey, I haven’t written a blog for 3 months. I’m definitely not getting my money’s worth from the £89 per year I’m paying WordPress for the domain name… I’ve not been blogging because I’m trying to write my third book – but progress is slow. I’d hoped to have finished my first draft by now…

A Facebook advert experiment

This post might be of interest to fellow Indie Authors who are wondering how to use facebook adverts, although bear in mind I’m a complete novice just guessing my way through it. If you are an expert, please feel free to leave any tips! I’ve been selling my books for almost a year now (I…

An Indie Author milestone

Yesterday I gave a talk about my books. In a major book store (Waterstones). As part of a book festival (Ness Book Fest). And people came to listen! It was awesome (from my point of view anyway – I can’t speak for the audience). I was nervous as had been given an hour slot and…

Too many choices

I just put my washing machine on and was thinking about how I only ever use one setting. Even if my life depended on it I don’t think I could be bothered finding out what the difference between all the settings is. It made me think about how we have so many pointless choices to…

People like free stuff!

Some more book sale number-crunching for those interested… Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing allows authors to offer their ebooks at a discount or free for limited periods of time. The free promo is only available for 5 days out of every 90 days. I can’t find how often the author is allowed to run a discount,…

Books sales and other stuff

It’s been ten months since I self-published my first book, Daughter, Disappeared, and six months since the second one, Glasdrum. After a few months I lost track of how many I was selling; it’s surprisingly hard to monitor because the dashboard sales reports are mostly on a rolling 30 day basis and each category of…