23 May 2020 No Comments
Criticism. As writers, sooner or later we’re likely to encounter it. How we deal with it – either internally or externally – depends greatly on our personality, and also I suppose, on what sort of place we’re in at any particular moment.
Here are some of my thoughts on the subject. More →
27 Mar 2020 No Comments
The truth is, as much as has been done by governments and leaders to save lives, much more could’ve been done and sooner – and wasn’t, or was done too late. Whether there will ever be any kind of reckoning for the irresponsible and cavalier way our lives were risked, endangered or bargained away, is unclear to me at this time. I hope so.
Not that it will undo any of the grievous losses many have endured, assuage the anguish of those who mourn, or soothe the trauma of those affected for life – or ease the untold economic struggles that await all of us post this disaster’s end – but it would be most satisfying to witness.
14 Jan 2020 No Comments
Imagine for a moment what it’s like being an indie author. It’s not that difficult I think – especially when put into the pretty harsh light of marketing. Basically when you’re indie, it means that if you don’t market yourself, you don’t get marketed at all. Social media plays a vital role in this self-promotion process, and especially (unfortunately), Facebook.
The unsocial media platform has groups – oodles of them – dedicated to fans of particular genres of writing. I doubt anyone has ever counted or taken stock of them all.
At first glance, all a writer needs to do is to join some of them – those that lend themselves to helping that writer market their work. It’s a great way to market your books if you’re an indie author – and there are many that do.
Unfortunately, it’s not always as simple as it could be.
Rant upcoming.
06 Jan 2020 No Comments
Looking back, it doesn’t seem all that long ago that I first started writing my Galaxii scifi series. As it turns out, that was back in 1991 – my final year of high school – when I first started writing the backstory of Galaxii. It was futuristic, it was distantly post-apocalyptic, that is, it was set about a century after a devastating war… World War 3… The Big Nuke.
The year of that war? 2020. More →
18 Apr 2019 No Comments
“Imagine, if you will:
In as much as it was unwise for any time-traveler to attempt to explain a television screen to a Grand Inquisitor of Medieval times – unless he had either a big gun handy, or a guaranteed running head-start with a fast horse waiting at the end of it – it would be particularly difficult for Johnathan Scrooby, a time agent, to explain the precise workings of the device he was using at that particular moment to someone from the twenty-second century.
It might be less risky perhaps, but just about equally as difficult. As an agent of the Time Saving Agency, a clandestine and inevitably mysterious and generally unknown super-secret organization charged with policing Time, it was his job to observe historical events in a completely different timeline in – er, real time. That way, at least hopefully, Time would turn out the way the curiously yet somehow accurately named Anals of History said it would.
Scrooby skipped back a thousand years, stopped, fine-tuned the time-stream, and zoomed in.
In the blackest veil worn by the night sky, a diamond shone – a solitary tiny sparkle lost in an ocean of faint tiny sparkles, a tiny orb of light in the immeasurably empty blackness of space: a star… but not just any boring old star. This star was special, and its name was Ramalama.” – from Underground Movement (book 7 in the Quantum Series). More →
05 May 2017 No Comments
There used to be a perception years ago that a writer who made use of self-publishing services was not a published “proper” author. In fact, back in the day, such authors who paid for publishing services were dismissed and criticized (often harshly) as ‘pretenders’ and wannabes, and the presses that offered such services were laughed off as ‘vanity press’ publishers.
But what about today? More →
18 Jan 2017 1 Comment
Hello fans! Yesterday, my long suffering PA and GF, Wendy K. Gloss, went on a road trip to the small city of Uitenhage, or to be more exact, to the VW museum which is right next door to the VW factory. This is the same factory where all South African VW Beetles (and more recently, the Bug-shaped ‘nice try’ they call ‘the new beetle’) were made.
I’ve been on holiday over December and January, and while I’ve been relaxing some of the time, I’ve also been doing a lot of D.I.Y. ‘stuff’ around the house. Yesterday was just a nice get away from it all, so Kay and I boarded Dolly (our 1962 1200cc VW) and took a casual, uneventful drive out to Uitenhage. More →
26 Oct 2020 No Comments
To Withdraw, Or Not To Withdraw – A Question Of Ethics
The topic I’ll be addressing in this article – to paraphrase the Bard, is: To withdraw, or not to withdraw? That is the question! And what a question it is, right? I mean, context is everything.
As writers, most of us submit our stories to any place we think could get us published, or which might in some way advance our writing careers. I know, I’ve been submitting stories to publishers, magazines, and anthologies since 1991 – since even before the now ubiquitous internet rose to dominate the publishing industry.
More →
by ChristinaEngela in Blog Tags: advice for writers, anthologies, authors, editing, ethics, exposure, indie, manucripts, professional, publishers, small press, submissions, unethical, unprofessional, withdrawal, writers