The Time Bubble

As the writing of the book continues to progress (well past the half way mark now) I am continuing to think about some of the other aspects of producing a book other than the writing. You'll recall last time I talked about cover art and categories. Today I am thinking about proofreading and editing. It is generally accepted that books need to be proofread by someone other than the author. I didn't take this seriously when I put my first book out, I considered I could do it myself. I was wrong. The end result was a first draft that went out riddled with errors. Fortunately I was able to pick up on this and get it cleaned up relatively easily and reloaded back on to Amazon. It wasn't as if there were thousands of paperbacks full of mistakes sat on shelves across the country. Even so, it was a lesson learned. Since then I have been really careful with everything I have done and checked and re-checked. Last month when I spoke to my editor at the Oxford Mail he said that...

The Time Bubble is progressing better than I could have hoped for. You'll remember before I started all of this that I questioned whether I would find writing fiction more difficult than writing non-fiction. As the weeks have gone by and the novel has taken shape those concerns have fallen away. I've become completely immersed in the tale and am managing to write around 7,000 words a week at present as I move onto the second half of the book. When I began I had a broad framework in place - a skeleton if you like of the basic structure of the book. I knew what the book was going to be about, the story I wanted to tell and how it would end. I had drafted a rough chapter structure and knew what was going to happen and where. Since then the writing process has been very much a case of putting the meat on the bones and as I've progressed there have been many opportunities to add in little scenes and bits of dialogue where they fit in nicely to the plot. It's not all se...

One of the things I am going to be using my blog for over the next couple of months is to record my thoughts as I put together The Time Bubble. Why am I doing this? Well, I'm still somewhat of a novice writer but it is incredible what I have learned over the past year. "If I had known then what I know now" is an oft quoted phrase but how very true it is when applied to this business. I have spent many hours reading other writer's blogs, forums and any other information I can get my hands on. Hardly a day goes by when I don't have a question that I need to Google. Here's a couple of examples of the sorts of things I have searched for. "How many words should a novel be?" "How many words should I write per day?" "What category should I place my book in?" And many more. These questions may sound newbie like but we all had to start somewhere. I am immensely grateful to all of the other writers out there who have provided info...

Before I start, I want to reassure you that this is not going to be an utterly predictable and clichéd rant about block voting about how certain countries always vote for each other etc etc. That subject has been done to death by all manner of people over the last few years, usually the "clever dicks" who like to offer "informed" opinions that they've either heard other people mouthing off about or that they've read in "The Sun". Yes, there is an element of that, but it's nothing like as pronounced as people would have you believe. But that's not the only reason we don't win. "All the other countries hate us" is the other xenophobic chant from the ill-informed masses. No. The truth is all the other countries hate our entries because they are on the whole, rubbish. We've no god given right to win the Eurovision song contest any more than we've got a right to win the World Cup because we "gave the game to the ...

Well, I am well and truly stuck in to writing my novel now, as some of you will be aware. It took me a long time to take this plunge into writing original fiction. My published works in the past - books and newspaper/ magazine articles have been almost exclusively in the non-fiction sphere. However, that's not to say I haven't written some pseudo-fiction in the past. Back in my school days, myself and a classmate started writing plays based on the antics of our friends in the school. I call them pseudo fictional because although they featured all of our friends rather than fictional characters they were all placed in ridiculous and outlandish scenarios. I guess satire would be the genre you would have placed these in. We were lampooning our friends in the same way Spitting Image were lampooning the politicians and the royals. These plays continued on in various shapes or forms for many years as far as the late 90s, even appearing as comedy sketches on the wall in the Wh...