Life can be painful, there’s no doubt. There can be moments that halt the creative flow, moments so annihilating you wonder if you will ever get the flow back. However as Talia Jager says ‘when life hands you lemons…toss them out, grab your stash of chocolate, your writing materials, and head for the bathroom. You may just end up writing a book.’
Moving around the world can do one of two things, it seems to me. It can inspire or it can pull you apart with sadness, longing for the place you call home. Julia Crane managed to make moving work for her. It gave her the time and space she needed to create the book she had always wanted to write. Julia is an Indie Chick, another of that group of women who have not taken setbacks lightly in order to further their careers as writers. Read on…
Carol Davis Luce offered up some succint and profound words when she sent her Indie Chicks piece to Mesmered – facts that seem overlooked so often by the mainstream publishing trade.
This is what she says: ‘Agents and editors think they know what readers want. They don’t always know. Readers know what readers want, and they’re expressing their wants by buying books written by indie authors. Give yourself a hardy pat on the back if you’ve completed a manuscript, but the big applause goes to our devoted fans and readers. Without them, we would be nothing.’
Wise words. If we all gave up at the first sign of a struggle, deciding it was all to hard, then we’d be doing ourselves and our dreams no favours. Christine Kersey never gave up, she moved herself forward, writing all the time – mainstream published and then choosing to go the indie route. She’s happy with her choices and explains why…
Mel Comley is astonishing. After re-establishing her home, her life and her business in France, she became bored and began writing. And writing and writing! She has never ever looked back, or if she does, it’s purely to find added inspiration for characters and settings for her works. Read on…
I’ve never really wanted to get into the mainstream vs indie argument that has waxed and waned over the Net for the last couple of years. To me all writers are just that – writers.
How they are published is immaterial. What matters is if either have readers and if they can entertain. But this is Read an E-Book Week and somehow it seems appropriate.
What is a villain?
If one looks up #904 ‘villain’ in Roget’s Thesaurus, it will list a plethora of alternate names ranging from ‘malefactor’ through ‘snake in the grass’ and ‘rogue’ to ‘knave’ and ‘cutthroat’ and many more besides.The word derives from the 1300’s from the term villein from the Anglo-French http://bit.ly/yPB6uF No doubt the upheavals of the peasantry during the Middle ages created a far more sinister meaning to the word.
Gisborne: Book of Pawns
The book that has dominated my life for the last eighteen months has finally been published as en e-book with the print version following in May. To say that I have enjoyed writing it is a given – Guy and Ysabel have become very close friends. But as with any book I write, whilst I have a loose plot outline in my head, I always love seeing where the characters will take me. At its inception there was absolutely no chance that there would be a second volume. But a chance writing of a tiny short-story for a miniature book laid a whole new plot in my head. And thus volume Two will be available in early 2013. This current e-book will be available at Amazon.co.uk within the week in an enhanced form with colour plates throughout: designed for the new colour e-readers. It will be available for all other e-readers (eg: Kobo, i-pad, Nook etc) in the next week.
The thing I like about Christine’s story is the unadulterated simplicity of an idea that happened in the blink of an eye … or more particularly, over the course of a telephone call. That and the name Lolo Productions. And of course both are linked closely. Christine iss also inventive in other ways, re-writing the fashion industry in a dark, dark way and running a magic blog that seeks to cloth the main characters in many novels. Brilliant. Simple. But then the best ideas always are.
When I first read Cheryl Bradshaw’s revelatory piece in the Indie Chicks’ Anthology, it was these words that drew my attention:
‘There were times when I felt like my life was like a shattered mirror, and I was on my hands and knees desperately searching for all the pieces of myself so I could glue them back together and feel whole again. During those times I wondered how many other women out there in the world felt the same exact way. ‘
