The paperback edition of Tamsin is now available from Amazon.com  and the Amazon UK outlet should be available in a few days. Last night's Riverside Writers meeting was interesting.  One of our members, Elizabeth Gates,  has a BA. Honours in English Language and Literature and an MA in Linguistics.  Since 1985, she has been a practising journalist. She is also an experienced ghostwriter. In 2005, Elizabeth trained as a personal and executive coach with the prestigious coach training school, Coaching Development. Since then she has developed the Lonely Furrow Company, which specialises in writing coaching and communication coaching using transactional analysis, neuro-linguistic programming and accelerated learning techniques. Elizabeth ran a workshop on how to overcome writers block.  She had put a considerable amount of forethought into the workshop, and included a few simple writing exercises, the first of which asked us ...

My two young silver-laced wyandottes, Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith, both laid their first eggs this morning!  The third, smaller, egg in the dish was laid by my older hen, Joyce Grenfell, who is an ISA Brown. You can watch them on this video:   

The paperback cover for "Tamsin" The paperback version of Tamsin (ISBN 9781468092684) is now available from here.   It will be become available on Amazon in around a week's time.  The ebook is already available, of course, and the ebook costs less. It will be interesting to discover which sells the most - the paperback or the ebook.  At this point I suspect it'll be the ebook but time will tell.  Not everyone owns an ereader, obviously.  I don't; I've got Adobe's free ereader on my PC, but I would like a Kindle simply because it saves buying half a rainforest's worth of paper each year.  Plus ereaders are so portable.  You can carry a library with you wherever you go.  When an ereader can double as a laptop (so I can write in Word then store the file for use on a PC-compatible CD), then I'll definitely get one.  Or maybe someone's already invented a gadget like this?  If so, let me know.  I won't even attempt to pre...

Yesterday I dropped the prices of all of my ebooks, and overnight I've seen an increase in sales.  One of the highly useful aspects of self-publishing with today's technology is that any author is free to make changes like this at the drop of a hat.  We can experiment to discover for ourselves what works and what doesn't, and adapt accordingly with a few clicks of a computer mouse.  The power is in our hands, rather than with a committee who "know best". Logic dictates that it's better to sell, say, 1,000 ebooks at $1 each than a few books at $6.99.  Logic also dictates that it's better to sell books than to leave them gathering dust on a shelf - hence my foray into self-publishing.  I've been traditionally published in the past, in fiction anthologies and as a non-fiction freelancer.   But could I sell my novels to an agent or publisher?  I was told they're not commercial, or too "occult", or too strange.  Let's let readers d...

It was reported that 32 of the top 50 best-selling book titles in America were ebooks.  That's good news for ebook self-publishers!  Or indie publishers, to coin the increasingly-used term.  I'm not sure who we're independent of - certainly not the ebook buyers or online vendors, or the various search engines, internet service providers, software script writers, reviewers, PayPal, the tax inspector, and so on.  All these do their bit to help, helping themselves along the way of course, which is fair enough.  Well, maybe I'll exclude the tax inspector from that last remark...   

Seaside Stories (working title) will be a free ebook distributed through Amazon Kindle and Smashwords (and via Smashwords, through Barnes & Noble, Sony, Apple iPlayer, Kobo, and Diesel). No-one earns any money - the aim is solely promotional. Wanted:   stories and poetry with a seaside theme.   Any genre is ok.  Poetry should be no longer than 40 lines.  Stories should be no longer than 1500 words.  But this is a guideline only - query if you have something which you think would be perfect but is outside of these word counts. Submissions Deadline:   June 1st, 2012. How to submit:    Submissions are open to all members of Riverside Writers , who are invited to send up to three pieces each, or more if they are smallish pieces.   Ask if unsure.   Participants might want to include a small biography of up to 500 words (no photos). Send by email to riversidewriters@aol.com .  Please do not send attachments.   ...

We spent the Xmas period waiting for the results of Richard's second MRI scan.  The doctors thought they had found something but weren't sure what, hence the need for the second test, this time with an injection of luminous gloop so they could see more clearly what may be causing his awful migraines.  The good news is that he only has an enlarged vein in his brain, which does not require any medical attention. Richard has suffered from migraines for over thirty years.  He's run through every tablet available on the NHS.  Most night's he's sat with an ice-pack on his head.  He also has irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) which means he can't drink alcohol, eat spicy or fatty foods, and has a string of allergies longer than your arm.  Eating out can leave him ill for days, even when the menu is pored over carefully.  Even minor changes of routine, such as a day's travelling, can put him in bed for days.  However, for years I've grumbled about his hor...