Yesterday morning, shortly after posting about social networking, I emailed my writers' group suggesting that we set up a joint website to promote our work, and the answer was a resounding YES! Things are still in their very early stages - we still haven't even decided on a name that a) we all like and b) is available as a toplevel domain name (.com or .net).

The aim is to have a standalone website with a shared blog for news about our projects, and to syndicate selected news (via RSS) to FaceBook and possibly other social networking sites - we're concerned about the copyright issues of posting our IP on sites we don't own and which have a habit of changing their T&C at the drop of a hat.

Watch this space for updates!

Posted by Anne at 9:48 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

The last few weeks have been so hectic, I haven't touched this blog! What with the day job, working on the latest draft of "The Guiser" and now keeping up with authonomy, I've hardly had a moment to sit back and smell the roses (which are lovely this time of year!).

However I have finally managed to snatch a long weekend, so I'm getting myself organised. I've started an account on FaceBook, and I'm going to sort out my shiny new iPhone and try and get an online networking strategy lined up. My main aim is to spread myself less thinly and keep up with my commitments!

Posted by Anne at 10:14 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

Just as I was starting to get back into writing again after my spring hiatus, what should happen but that I strain my back whilst gardening! Aargh! The worst thing was that I couldn't sit up and use a computer without suffering distracting levels of agony; even propping myself up to use a notepad and pen got uncomfortable very quickly. Hence the lack of blog activity...

Thankfully I'm on the mend and able to type again without too much pain. I've given some serious thought to the way the plot of "The Guiser" was developing, and have decided to start a new draft that will give me more room for character development, instead of trying to cram a series-worth of plot ideas into a single book!

I've also joined Authonomy, a writers' community set up by HarperCollins. It's a slightly awkward cross between a critique group and an online slushpile - I'm viewing as a place to get wider feedback on my work and do a bit of networking, and if my work happens to catch an agent's or editor's eye (unlikely, but probably better odds than winning the lottery), so much the better. You can join up without having a book of your own to tout, and should you be interested, you can read the opening chapters of "The Guiser" - all comments welcome!

The publishing industry is undergoing an uncomfortable transition between paper and ebook at the moment, and no-one really knows what's going to happen next. People still want paper books, and they still have very varied tastes, but the rise of Amazon means that bricks-and-mortar stores can't compete with the breadth of stock, so publishers are concentrating more and more on "safe" investments like celebrity memoirs and a few well-known chick-lit/crime/thriller authors.

Online self-publishing clearly isn't the answer, because there's no quality control, and who out there wants to wade through the slushpile on the publishers' behalf? What we need is the publishing-house equivalent of Amazon, a credible brand that's able to back numerous titles and provide editorial quality control, and make the resulting novels available as ebooks or POD. Oh yes, and the price of ebooks needs to come down. Paying almost as much for the electronic version as for a real paper copy that costs tangible resources to produce and ship just isn't going to wash with the Internet generation.

Maybe this is already happening and I'm just not casting my net widely enough. That's the trouble with the Internet - so many pages, so little time. Enough - I'm in danger of rambling!

Posted by Anne at 11:33 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the last person on the Web to hear about this. Not being a Tweeter, and having spent the Easter weekend working on the allotment and garden, I only found out about it when I went to I Should Be Writing, where it was the most recent post.

I wouldn't be blogging about it so long after the fact, except that whilst reading an article about it on the BBC website, I discovered that a member of my own writers' group, Alex Beecroft, had been one of the earliest victims. Since I spent a good bit of this week reading the first draft of her latest gay romance novel, this does rather drag me into the affair, so to speak :)

Now, since I've been boycotting Amazon ever since the business with Hachette last summer, my opinion of them has not exactly been high, but today it reached a new low. Admittedly after Damien McBride's recent idiocy they're up against stiff competition on the cock-up front, but this only goes to prove that having such a large part of the writing market in the hands of a vast multinational like Amazon is a Really Bad Idea.

Nowadays I buy most of my books either from a bricks-and-mortar store, or in the case of out-of-print books, I use AbeBooks rather than Amazon Marketplace. It may not be much in the great scheme of things, but as they say, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Posted by Anne at 7:52 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

In an uncanny and entirely unintentional repeat of last year, I've gone two and a bit months without posting on this blog because I haven't been writing. Last year the hiatus was from Feb 16th to April 20th; this year it was Feb 6th to April 19th. Weird or what?

Whatever it is, my batteries obviously need to recharge at the end of each winter. I spent the whole of yesterday working on the new webcode underlying this site (a simple web-based CMS built using CakePHP), a job I've been putting off since the beginning of the year. I still need to fix my blog, having installed the latest version of Movable Type a couple of weeks ago - the template isn't quite right, and some of the archives are broken - but on the whole I'm happy with the result. The CMS means I can update the pages of my site from a browser rather than logging into the server or using FTP, which might encourage me to update it more often!

Posted by Anne at 6:17 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

Yesterday's quandary about the identity of my monarch has led me to a bigger question - the Reformation and its effects on England. Simply put, the Reformation had such an enormous effect on England, and especially London, that it would take a lot more work to develop the world properly. For example, a large number of well-known buildings in Elizabethan London, including Bethlem Hospital, originally belonged to the Church, so would not be available for secular uses. I would have to completely rewrite all the scenes in Bedlam, and perhaps rethink that strand of the story, to reflect that.

Pondering this, and the fact that replacing 'queen' with 'king' in my draft had not been wholly satisfactory, I realised there was another possibility: to move the "change point" of my altered history further along the timeline, after the Reformation was well under way!

Continue reading "Reformation" »

Posted by Anne at 6:52 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

I'm struggling with the sex of my alternative Tudor monarch at the moment. In the original, non-historical draft of my WiP, I had a king, then for reasons I forget I changed him to a fictional Tudor queen when I transplanted the story to the real sixteenth-century London. The problem for me now is that Elizabeth is such an integral part of our mental image of that period, that I have to keep reminding myself that my made-up queen isn't her. And if I can't keep a clear image of her in my head, how is the ordinary reader going to manage?

So, I'm going to try replacing my shadowy queen with a larger-than-life Tudor king, a young man who is lauded as his illustrious great-grandfather Henry VIII reborn. However I don't think I should call the young king Henry, as that would be a bit confusing as well. So the question now is, what is the king's name?

I'm considering two possibilities at the moment: Edward VII (which would require Edward VI to have reigned as per our history), and Arthur I (after Henry VIII's brother). The latter is very tempting, but I wonder if readers would find that far too misleading?

Posted by Anne at 7:09 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

Once again our cable connection to the InterWebz is down, so I have no access to the 'Net at home. Virgin Media are sending a technician round on Monday morning, but until then I probably won't be round. I guess it's a good excuse to get on with my writing, but it is annoying since I'm having to cram everything into today - tracking the progress of my ebook repair, etc, etc. So much of my life revolves around my connection to the web - I feel like a Borg cut off from the Collective! :)

Posted by Anne at 12:02 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

The MacBook Air arrived yesterday lunchtime, after a morning of impatiently working at home. Luckily the dining room where the Linux box lives is at the front of the house so I could keep an eye on the street. I wasn't able to try it out properly until the evening, since I decided to try use Migration Assistant over wireless, which took about four hours, but I think it was worth it - much less hassle than manually copying the files over and installing all my applications. The only thing I had to do manually was to reselect the icons I wanted in CandyBar, as for some reason those settings didn't get copied over.

So far I'm loving the Air. The new trackpad is great: I like being able to tap it directly (the old MacBook theoretically allowed one to use taps instead of the button, but I found it rather flaky) and use other gestures such as a two-finger tap for right-click. I'm not so keen on the changes to the function buttons, which are in different places to the ones on my old MacBook and work slightly differently. For example, I had gotten used to being able to hit F8 to get Spaces, but now it needs Fn+F8. Thankfully a little app called FunctionFlip has solved this - I now have the F8 key set up to open Spaces instead of acting as a Play/Pause button. Since the media keys don't work on VLC, which is what I use to play AVI files with, it's no great loss.

I've decided to use the Air as a dedicated writing machine, so although I have all my favourite apps like Scrivener and SuperNotecard on the Dock, I have deliberately removed the Mail icon to reduce distractions. I can still get my Mail on the Air, since all the settings (and old email) got copied across, but I have to go hunting in the Applications folder to do so - which is a big disincentive to casually check it! I also have some nice new wallpaper: a photo of the interior of the Globe Theatre, from WikiMedia :)

My old MacBook has been put out to pasture as a "desktop" machine, to be used for email, backing up my Palm, doing web development and all those non-writing-related tasks that can be such a distraction. With a little TLC it's probably good for a few years yet!

Posted by Anne at 2:47 PM | Permalink

Whilst looking into replacement options for my aging* MacBook, I made the mistake of looking around the Apple Store. What did I see but a refurbished MacBook Air, for less than the price of a new aluminium MacBook - even after education discount on the latter! Stocks being limited and all, I decided I had better snap one up or forever regret it, so after a lot of heart-searching about breaking my promise to myself, I decided to go for it. And guess what - it was already out for delivery when I checked the UPS website this morning! I can hardly wait...

Posted by Anne at 7:24 AM | Permalink