Hoarding Can Be Good
Okay, I admit it, I am pretty bad for hoarding. Look at my bookshelves. I am not going to read every one of these again. In fact, I suspect only perhaps 15% of them will be read. I have books I adore (and know pretty much off by heart), and which I cannot get rid … Continue reading
Back to Work
It’s been a hectic year, again. I suppose I ought to apologise for the radio silence in the last few months, but … well, there’s not enough hours in the day. My YouTube channel has been taking off in recent months. It suffered last year (as did this blog) because my family has had the … Continue reading
Breaking Paragraphs – Student Help 3
This is the transcript of my latest video. In this I am talking about splitting paragraphs into their constituent sentences. By doing this, you can see where a paragraph is going wrong, where sentence structure is poor, and more easily see how to fix things! When sentences are embedded in their paragraph, it’s difficult, often, … Continue reading
Students Help – Analysing Your Essay – Form and Transcript.
This is the transcript of the Youtube video which I put up here today. It is primarily aimed at students, but be aware that the same approach works for any writing. Whether you are an aspiring author, a journalist or a business manager trying to write a report, the same disciplines apply. At the bottom … Continue reading
Beginning a New Story
This week I’m embarking on a new novel, and I’m going back to my roots. Yes, it’s a crime novel. I’ve had a few people ask me how I actually get started with a book. The simple answer is, I don’t know. The ideas begin when I have a basic concept occur to. Sometimes that … Continue reading
NaNoWriMo and more…
There are plenty of people who’ve been trying desperately hard to write in the last few weeks since the start of NaNoWriMo ’15. I can all too easily empathise with their frustrations. One thing that many people don’t realise, when they set out to write something, is that there are very few jobs quite so … Continue reading
New Moves!
I’ve been having a lot of fun recently and it’s getting better. Some of you will have occasionally sprinted over to writerlywitterings on YouTube and seen some of my videos on my books and on writing. Not yet? Go and check it out. The videos seem to have interested a lot of people, and because of … Continue reading
Sorting the Good from the Bad
I once read that the real problem that the allies had during the second Gulf War was information overload. They had satellites, men on the ground, aircraft, communications intelligence – so much data was coming in, that they couldn’t focus. Yes, the weaponry was superior, but they kept hitting the wrong targets because analysis was … Continue reading
Morris – an Introduction
There are some elements of any culture that cause embarrassment or difficulties when trying to translate them to people from other countries. I daresay some Scots find explaining why men wear kilts (and do or don’t wear anything beneath) as tricky, let alone the attraction of the noise of a series of pipes fed by a bladder … Continue reading
Warning – More Writing Advice to Come!
This is a short blog this week. Two reasons, first, I’ve been inside working the whole time on the first draft of my next book; second, because I’m working on this novel, I don’t have much time to play with blogs! However, I thought it was only fair to let people know what I’m going … Continue reading
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