Let’s play ditch, rewrite or edit!

Yes I know, I’m like a bus.  You wait ages for one and then three posts come along at once.  What can I say, I’m in a particularly ranty and chatty mood.  Make the most of it, I’ll probably disappear for the next two months.  Well, I’ll try not to, but you know how it is 🙂

Anyway, enough rambling.  I’ve been reading through the third book (again) and have decided once and for all that I hate bits of it.  Not hate in the same way that I hated Pterodactyl, but close.  Not all of it you understand, I still like the first couple of chapters, but everything after that doesn’t feel right.  I can’t quite explain it and it’s probably because I’ve spent so long doing other things and not writing, but somethings wrong.

Retribution Is Complete

Now, before you get too worried, ‘Shadow Retribution’ is the name of my second book so you can rest easy that I haven’t gone and done something bad to anyone else.

It’s taken close to 6 months to completely edit, rewrite, re-read, re-edit, re-read and ‘fix’ all of the grammatical and spelling errors, but it’s now finished, and after reading it so many times I can definitely say that if I never read it again I won’t be sorry.  Actually that’s a bit of a porky but you get the gist.  If you’re interested the first three chapters are on the novels page and it’s currently under ‘review’ by Amazon prior to publishing.

Subtext….. aka That’s Not What I Meant!

When I sit down and write I obviously know what I want to say.  It might take some tweaking during the editing and revision phases, but the intent is always obvious.  To me anyway.  That’s where it all falls down though and the next person that reads the book/paragraph/dialogue may leave with a totally different impression.  Some would argue that this is totally avoidable and that the fault is the writers.  Hmmmm.  I’m not convinced it’s that cut and dried.

Formatting Books For Kindle

As I’ve mentioned before, getting a standard document into a format that the Kindle can use properly (note the use of the word properly there) can be a little cumbersome.  Look on Google and there are 101 guides on how to do it, and each does something different.  The bottom line is that the process I use works, but so do many others – unfortunately due to the way Amazon have developed their toolset it’s pretty much mandatory that the source file is HTML before running the KindleGen utility and that’s what causes some of the issues.

Fallen off a bike? Take the car…..

There’s an old adage about falling off a horse/bike/anything (delete as applicable) that if you fall off you should get back on and try again.  Eventually you’ll get the hang of it.

Well, not wanting to conform I’d disagree with that.  Sometimes the best thing to do is decide not to bother with the bike/horse and take the car instead (it’s an analogy before anyone berates me for my CO2 emissions).

Game Changer – The Kindle Effect

Despite my previous rant about e-book pricing even I acknowledge that the Kindle is a game changer.  Not the e-book reader in general, the Kindle – it’s pretty much single-handedly responsible for the acceptance and take up of ebooks and e-book readers.  Is that going too far?  No.  And I’ll explain why and what impact it could have on people like me who write as a hobby.

Writing…. Relaxing? Pah!

Well, as Mark Twain said, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.  Well, not so much my death but the fact that I shamefully haven’t done any updates for quite a while.  For that I apologise.  I seriously admire those bloggers who can submit new posts multiple times a week, not just that but actually have something interesting to say.

I’ll try to be better.  Promise.

Fear and Loathing in Milton Keynes

I had to go to Milton Keynes over the weekend with work and since it’s a 6 hour round trip I had plenty of time for thought and contemplation.  Admittedly my main area of thought and contemplation should have been the motorway, but when you’re driving somewhere you’ve been many times it tends not to be an issue – the old autopilot kicks in.

Man! I Feel Like A Woman (and a whole lot of other people)

In common with most fiction my book contains characters.  No surprise there really.  Some of them are men, some of them women and they range in age from 13 to 50.  Some of them are good and some of them are bad.  I’m not going to go into detail about all of them, but each has their own personality and quirks as you would expect.

My Novels a Hedgehog and I’m a Dog

Just before anyone asks, yes I’m perfectly sane.  Mostly.

Our dog Bonnie has a habit of catching hedgehogs and bringing them home.  This happened a couple of days ago and it suddenly occurred to me that writing a novel is a lot like catching a hedgehog.  That may sound bizarre, but bear with me and I’ll explain.