Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Dio song as origin of this blog's title. I took an unannounced week off here, because I took a week off there, in work-land. I had high hopes for this week. My pool game continues to improve. I really need to start blogging about that so I can …
Continue reading It’s like broken glass, you get cut before you see it…
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Front cover is finalized. Paperback and hardback covers are underway. Formatting proceeds, and once that and the print covers are complete I will have a book ready to go. So hopefully all will be in place by the end of this month. Fingers crossed, but monkeys armed with …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Fourteen versions and a few fragments later, I have something approaching a reasonable blurb for the book. It is not deliberately seeded with search optimization friendly phrases. I’ll look and see what can be ‘subtly’ added. Perhaps. I wonder, given the evolution of search engines, what the latest …
Continue reading Fourteen blurbs and some physical procrastination
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This has been a week either of failure, or of tremendously successful procrastination. I can’t lie, I have done not a thing on the book. I opened the file a few times and glanced at the legend ‘Chapter 1’, but then looked away. Why? Well, last week I …
Continue reading I’ll think of a title later… (The Procrastinator’s Credo)
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I had a conversation this weekend. It happens. In it I explained the boring drudgery of repeatedly going through a book you have written, making changes each time, and then going through it again to make sure that the changes are consistent with the existing text, and where …
Why yes, yes I am. Except I had this deadline for a first draft that expired in January, unmet. I think the gods are mocking me for answering a goodreads question about writer’s block and saying “I don’t really suffer from it, but here’s what I do when it kind of strikes…” Bazinga! It struck, …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Hey, Aren’t You Writing a Book?
I’m going to try to keep this one brief. You know, because I’ve got things to do. In this fourth installment of the doubt series, (Here are one, two and three) I’d like to say that procrastination can be a profound expression of doubt, of fear holding us back. I held myself back for 25+ …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Doubts Part 4: Procrastination, The Thief of Time
While I’ve always wanted to be a writer, for far too much of my life I wanted to write a first draft, be praised for my creativity, and have that draft magically transformed into a bestseller by some random alchemy that had nothing to do with me working on it myself. I wanted all the …
I should really leave this page blank. That would serve my title best. Minimalist humour - I'm incapable of it! So yeah - I'm sure I read advice before I started about how to be successful at blogging, and part of it was to, you know, blog. Regularly. Often would be better. It has been …
Roderick T. Macdonald 