This feature is in association with NetGalley. Five Unforgivable Things, Vivien Brown Thanks to NetGalley and to Harper Impulse for an advance copy of Five Unforgivable Things. I wouldn’t normally pick up a story about family relationships let alone infertility and IVF, so I am grateful to have been granted this opportunity. I found it…
Tuesday 17 September 2019
Wow! What a wild weekend we had … well, it was busy. And interesting. Friday morning I had my first 25 minutes on social media, and I wrote a blog post. A Sky delivery that was supposed to arrive between 10:30am and 11:30am finally arrived at midday, with no apology from the driver. I had a hair…
Goldthorpe Writers: Monday 16 September 2019
We had a few more bodies turn up at the writers’ group this week, which meant we needed to find somewhere in the library that we wouldn’t disturb the other library users. We were given one of the interview rooms, which was a bit cramped for five of us, but made it very cosy and…
Friday 13 September 2019
My first 25 minutes yesterday were spent looking at houses. We’re not planning on moving any time soon, but I do like to keep an eye on the market and I needed to clear a load of sold properties out of my RightMove account. The next 25 minutes were spent on my social media morning…
Diary of a pocket novel – the start of Act 2 Part 1
At the beginning of September I joined a quick online course, 14 Days to a Solid Writing Habit. Since we started the actual writing part of this course, I’ve been setting my Pomodoro Tomato and writing in 25-minute bursts. Some of those bursts have been spent on writing The Fool. I’ve also been learning more about…
Thursday 12 September 2019
I’ve finally taken the leap and moved over to the WordPress *new* block editor. I resisted for such a long time because, well, I know where everything is on the classic editor, and every time I looked at the block editor, the first thing I wanted to do required extensive research, and I never seem…
Wednesday 11 September 2019
Yesterday was a very good day. It’s as though Tuesday is the new Monday. I’ve always been more enthusiastic and productive on a Monday and then it’s generally all downhill from there. But now Monday afternoons are taken up, all of that has changed. I started the morning with just one Pomodoro (25 minutes) on…
Diary of a non-fiction book: Work at last
I’m so happy. I’ve finally found some time to write some actual words. I know my last post said that this post would cover reading and making notes, but this is such a landmark that I had to share it. I’ve not done a great deal. I’ve had a few goes at setting Scrivener up…
Goldthorpe Writers: Monday 9 September 2019
Despite various promises from various people, there were still only two of us at the writers’ group this week. Not that we mind, we get one-to-one feedback on several extracts or pieces of work in one go. But it would be nice to see a few others start to attend as well, especially those who…
Tuesday 10 September 2019
I’m starting to feel quite pleased with myself and the progress I’m making in Scrivener. having to reinstall it so many times (not Scrivener’s fault this time) is forcing me to learn to do the things I like much quicker. If I have to do one more reinstall, for whatever reason, I swear I’ll be…
Monday 9 September 2019
Friday was a good day, although I was still faffing with Scrivener as it was a new reinstall. I’d learnt a lot of things during the outage the previous day and I wanted to apply some of what I’d learnt. I did my 14 Days … exercise and rebooted my Pomodoro Tomato. During the morning…
Diary of a non-fiction book: Setting up Scrivener
I didn’t have a lot of joy opening up my Scrivener binder for The Life of Richard Cadbury. And several times I came *this close* to just opening a new Word file. That wouldn’t do, though, as I really like working in Scrivener and therefore it needs to be working right. I couldn’t get it to…
Diary of a pocket novel – the end of Act 1
Thanks to my Monday afternoon writers’ group I’m being forced to work on the pocket novel. We’re supposed to bring something new to every session, either something we’re working on or something set to a theme. As I’m working on so many different projects, I decided to use this as an excuse to crack on…
Friday 6 September 2019
Yahoo mail fell over yesterday, which meant I couldn’t pick up Day 4 of 14 Days … I did nip onto the forum to see if there was a link to web version, but nobody replied. Perhaps I should have just reported it as a fault. The crash was global, apparently, and started at about…
Diary of a non-fiction book: Initial research
As soon as I received the email go-ahead from the publisher I started to make tentative enquiries into who could help me with the research for The Life of Richard Cadbury. Telephone research I started in Birmingham, with a charitable trust I’d been told might have some pictures of him while I was researching A History…
Thursday 5 September 2019
I didn’t do so well on the word-count yesterday. My morning was pretty much wasted due to me waiting on something Really Important in an online game I play. I’m trying to curb my time on social media anyway, but this game is turning into a real time-sucker. Recently, I’ve been looking at it over…
Wednesday 4 September 2019
Yesterday was a good productive day. My morning session was 10am to 1pm and I managed to write one blog post, schedule one blog post and I started the collation for a new non-fiction book, another writers’ guide, Diary of a Non-Fiction Book. I also did the first exercise of the day for 14 Days…
Goldthorpe Writers: Monday 2 September 2019
The schools still weren’t quite back on Monday when we met after the August bank holiday, and while there were three of us present this time, one of us, the librarian, had to help with staff training. Pauline and I are qetting quite used to having the whole 90 minutes to ourselves! Fortunately, Pauline had…
Diary of a non-fiction book #2: New beginnings
This is my second diary of a non-fiction book, although the first was never completed. It got a bit busy and I didn’t have time to update it. So I’m going to try again with this one. I’ve already done some work on The Life of Richard Cadbury, so this initial diary post will include that….
Tuesday 3 September 2019
I’m getting used to the electronic diary, but it’s taking time. I keep wanting to look at something in my physical diary and then remembering that it’s on my phone or on the desktop. I finished the quick editing job yesterday morning and sent it back explaining that while I’m quite busy for the next…
