Time and tribulations

I was thinking this week about time. When we’re young it seems interminable, as if the awaited birthday or Christmas will never arrive. Then as we get older the days and weeks whizz past, and we can’t believe another month has gone already. It was also confusing when I signed up for a course based …

Pantsers, Psyche and garden paths.

I believe I started this blog in February around 6 years ago because ‘that’s what authors did.’ The intention was it would be a showcase for my books as they were published, and everyone would immediately rush out and buy them. It would make me rich and famous, and I could spend my life writing …

Country Boys and Singers

I was always an Elvis fan but remember sitting up with my dad to watch the Tom Jones programmes after Mum had gone to bed. I know he has a reputation as a womaniser, but being with the same woman for such a long time I believe he truly loved his wife and she was …

Marketing and ABC Destiny

First of all, thank you to everyone who responded to my questions last week, including the members of the Facebook online writing group during the blog posting day. You’ve probably heard me say it before but I love writing and hate marketing. I know all the theory and how things should be done, and that …

Author anniversary and Amazon Categories

When my first book was released, I assumed authors wrote a book then sat back while royalties flooded in from everyone who had bought it, and the publishers did everything else. Expecting to sell millions of copies under my pen name (because all proper authors use a pen name, don’t they?) it was quite an …

Workmen and book reviews.

A fellow author on Facebook posted a snippet of conversation between two ladies which angered her, but I found rather sad. The gist of it was they would not read any book which had less than 1,000 reviews. It was also a dig at Indie or self-published authors and the smaller publishers. The lady who …

The Making of ‘Weird and Peculiar Tales.’

This was originally intended as a Facebook post but for various reasons has ended up as a blog post instead. Here is a little of the background to how Weird and Peculiar Tales came about. I first ‘met’ my co-author Paula around six years ago through an online writing site. We seemed to be pretty …

Technology, Gremlins and Spirits

Last week I jokingly said on Facebook that as my ‘Val’s Tales’ business page was being ‘new and improved,’ obviously something was bound to go wrong. (Facebook is the dedicated social media site where I often publish short stories to give readers a flavour of my writing style, and encourage interest in my books.) In …

Books, blogs and marketing.

When I started my blog, the idea was to bombard you with ‘Buy my books’ messages so you all rushed out and bought them. That way I would be rich and famous and could sit around all day writing, which is what I love to do. It didn’t quite turn out that way and in …

Friends of Friends and Facebook

This week has been so slow with connections, I wasn’t sure if it was my keyboard, mouse, laptop or just because there’s an R in the month. I received an advice in the spam email that someone in Moscow had accessed my account. I reported it, but for a moment it did make me think …