Melissa Smith’s story sent shivers down my spine. Grief is the most profound emotion. It often features in my novels in various ways and I dig into my soul and recall the feelings I had when Dad died. I think you should just read on and see what she has to say…
I’d had a good morning. Dressed in my city jeans, city shirt and city shoes (favourite camel JP Tods bought from the USA), city perfume, city makeup, jewelry, clean hair … you know, the sort of thing you do when you are going shopping. Not dressed up to the nines but a damn sight better than the last five months of aged shorts or farm jeans.
Bells ring when I read Michelle Muto’s story of how she came to be published. I often say of my books, when I see a wonderful spike upward 
in their sales, that they remind me of the little engine that could, puffing up the hill and saying ‘I think I can, I think can.’
This post was prompted by an idea a friend (EA West.com) had for a trip around the feature settings of various novels. She asked me where I would go and I chose a special place from Gisborne: Book of Pawns and decided to write a travel diary…
For a little while recently, I had observed increasing fascination with Pinterest but had never bothered to look at it myself. My writer’s life is full of research, writing in longhand, transcribing, editing, my blog, Facebook-Writer, Facebook-Private, Twitter and a writer’s office business. I felt introducing any more online bit and bobs into my life would cause my writing to suffer.
Happy Easter everyone!
(NB: Image before photoshop courtesy of BBC/Tiger Aspect Productions)
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…
Last year was somewhat of a milestone birthday and as it passed, I made a mini-Bucket List (sort of child’s beach-bucket size) of all the things I want to do between now and whenever.
It involved things like a helicopter ride to my favourite place. A light aircraft ride to a world recognized wilderness area. Visits to all the parts of this absolutely beautiful state that I have never seen because I’ve been too busy visiting overseas places, or too busy looking after family, or too busy living in cities away from Tasmania, or too busy ‘being’ on the coast. Scuba-diving lessons. (Not sure about this one as I am claustrophobic, which come to think of it may affect the helicopter and the light aircraft, but on the plus side I love swimming underwater.) Climb to the top of Mount Maria and so on…
It’s been over five months since my OH, dogs and I moved to a tiny coastal village to live through the summer. It’s only 30 minutes from our farm and so it hardly made a dint in that side of our lives and from the POV of writing, it made no difference at all because laptops travel … amazingly!
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.’
