Taking a Break!

Hi - I'll be away for a little while, but please visit again in a couple of weeks by which time my Blog should be back on track.

Go well.

Jeff

Marketing is Good!

The story is written, the cover is fantastic and Amazon is doing a brilliant job of presenting the finished article.  However, no matter how much I like to think that the result of twenty years of hard graft is going to sell itself,  it won't amount to anything without constant marketing and promotion.

Good writing is paramount and social networks give you access to people who matter most - the readers. Creating a Facebook Page is a perfect solution for advertising your product and a Twitter Profile can help attract new readers. Joining forums and actively participating in discussions encourages a whole new group of potential fans. Recent news items on self-publication have been good exposure, but writers have to be proactive nowadays.  

Feedback is just as important and by far the biggest buzz I've had this week is my first, independent Sons of Africa  review - I couldn't have wished for better.

Keep reading.

Zooming In On Past Places!

Had a play on Google Earth last night and after wrestling with an upgrade, managed to get the big, blue earth to move for me. Reckon I confused its software brain by punching in unfamiliar South African place names – anyway, got there eventually.

Still struggle with the little orange man though, tends to end up in people’s gardens rather than out on the road, then I click on the wrong thing and end up zooming off into the stratosphere. Don’t matter, eventually I get things reasonably sorted out and go for a stroll round the streets. Try to use the sidewalk – wouldn’t do for me to get run over; have a horror of being carted off in a virtual ambulance and set upon by virtual doctors.

Enjoy the less obvious: a dog watching from behind a fence, kids coming back from school with skewed ties and overloaded book bags, people caught by the Google man and left there on the screen – shout ‘hello’ as I pass them by. Things look different now – sometimes it’s good to look back, there again, sometimes it’s better just to move on...

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Throw Out The Flowers!

Hi – if memory serves as it should do, then first recollections of yours truly having written something half decent would surely spring from my final year at high school. Not so sure it was that good though, more than a little bit sickly would probably stand as fair and accurate. Something about the ‘joyous leaping of wild trout, spangled rainbows and waterfalls flashing like diamonds’ –  more adjectives and similes than my English teacher could shake her stick at, but she loved it. Teachers and adjectives go hand-in-glove. Flowery descriptions were, and still are, much nurtured in high schools; allowing teachers brief escape from mundanity, a short walk amongst those weird worlds of literary euphoria.

One verb, two nouns and the rest, adjectives – guaranteed to get you up in front of the class. Threw my cringe glands into overdrive and despite my prayers for a sudden bout of laryngitis, I ended up with my back to the blackboard and about-faced to thirty spiteful fellow scholars whom, by this time were quietly wetting themselves.

The opening line began with ‘Splash!’ This, I shall put down to personal naivety, though at the time I regarded my staccato-like intro as a good, action-packed gambit to ‘grab the reader’, though which part it was meant to grab, to this day boggles the mind. That’s when the snorts came and our normally well-behaved fourth year class of ’63 degenerated into a scene from Orwell’s, Animal Farm. However, words is words, even the dreaded adjective is entitled to a public showing; though now, to a wiser me, less is definitely more. So my first attempt at fiction, along with all its splendiferous adjectives and pretentious similes will be left where it belongs – buried in the past...

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Let's Talk About Writing!

Hi,

Completing my first crack at novel-writing was a really big deal for me. It still is, but then there are hundreds of wannabe writers out there heading down that same, precarious highway – so nothing unique in what I’ve done. Though starting a novel is pretty easy, finishing it is a completely different story and only a very small percentage of writers see their journey through to the end.

How excited we get when first words spring up on the screen and you yell out ‘Come and listen to this!’ to your nearest and dearest. That first stab at a keyboard. A sentence, two lines at the most before you lean back, struck dumb by what you perceive to be a work of sheer genius. Everyone gathers round: your wife or hubby, the cat, the dog, grandma and granddad, the kids and next door’s kids. Then you read and everyone in the room goes quiet. Their expressions change to those of drugged cod and with weird grins they nod, dribble and then run for the door before a string of ‘whadyathinks’ comes after them.

A month later, typo-infested pages are shoved inside a padded envelope and mailed to some agent’s burgeoning slush pile...    

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At Long Last!

The deed is done! Sons of Africa is now on Amazon; the Kindle books section. Fairly priced and in my opinion, well-written – already readers on both sides of the pond have downloaded it and in some cases, contacted me directly to say how much they’ve enjoyed the story. The sample chapters, I hope, will persuade you to read on.

Here's the link: Sons of Africa

Thank you for your support. Hope you stay with me for the sequel, Empress Gold – bit of a ripper.

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