Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Here we are at the end of 2025! It has been a year, as they say. A writing retrospective. I published my third novel this year, which pleases me no end. Having three novels to my name does make me feel much more established as a writer. I …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Another week passes. This time next week I hope to have released the new hardback version of The Thief and The Demon. I will share here the new cover when I receive it. I have been working on getting set up to do the narration of my books. …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! So nice to see you! I blog therefore I am. You read (and like) and therefore you are? I have no idea. But I’d like to hope you are real: an audience of bots and AI scraping around for usable data that isn’t already AI generated would be …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This blog brought to you by Florence and the Machine’s High as Hope album. And some of Ceremonials. What The Water Gave Me is fantastic. Two big thoughts this week. (Not legitimately big, just the two discrete subjects I want to briefly discuss. Discreetly.) 1) The internet can …
Continue reading Restraint and Discernment : A Writer’s Thoughts for the Week
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I missed last week. I thought about putting out a quick blast for the sake of keeping up with weekly output, but decided not to. Better silence than thoughtless blather, I hope! I have been watching lots of writerly videos on You Tube this week. Yes, this is …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! How many times can a book be finished? Many many times. Given that, I have finished making the final proofing corrections. So from my perspective the book is done. I will still read it again, because the last thing I did was a specific word check, and as …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! 19% of the way through updating my manuscript for the last time. Not long now, and I’m extremely ready to be finished with it. Having said that, I’m very pleased with this last pass – final improvements have been made. This is why writers can tinker forever – …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I did not remain in editing hell, my friends, though I am grateful I visited, because I fixed two small issues that came out on the multiple repeated passes I made as I chased some words and phrases through the text. In short controlled bursts. One would have …
Continue reading Escape Velocity Achieved, New World Sighted.
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! It was just a couple of things, honest. I have opened the door to editing hell. I was just checking where the eyes were, none glued to anything inappropriate in the text, as can sometimes happen. I checked because I was reminded of Don McNair’s book on Editor-proofing …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! So a few weeks ago I’d finished again. Well, now I’ve started again. This is not editing hell. Exactly. But I have felt moved to fix some detail work. I decided to remove all sets of parentheses (there were three), and will give $15 to the first person …
Roderick T. Macdonald 