Category: Staff Articles

Writing advice and insights from the staff of Indies Unlimited.

Who Knew?

Author Carolyn Steele

Writing a decent book takes work apparently, I’m gobsmacked. No, really. I mean, you go off for a couple of years Having Adventures, you blog about it as you go, then you tack the blog posts together and call it a book…that should be enough, right?

Then, when you send the book to your favourite editor he writes back, “This is just a series of events.” Well, duh, that’s what I wrote, it’s what happened. He goes on to tell me stuff that should only apply to fiction writers, and moreover, the sort of fiction writers who haven’t read Lin’s Breaking the Rules series. “People like to read about conflict and resolution, you need some more structure and direction and a lot more internal motivation. This has to be about your psychological journey.” Continue reading “Who Knew?”

Entertainment to suit the age

Entertainment to suit the age

We seem to live in a sensationalist age, when things come to our notice only when they have become famous… or notorious. Celebrity-watching is super popular, and books seem to become instantly famous if they contain some controversy that brings them to the notice of the reporting and investigative media, more than literary critics or literary supplements.

Why is this? What is happening really? Are people losing interest in themselves in favour of celebrities? Are books becoming mere channels for discussion and debate? Perhaps this is simply a fashion or fad. It certainly has been going on for some time. There is a morbid interest among the general public for things that contain some sort of controversy. Continue reading “Entertainment to suit the age”

A Matter of Perspective

Lonely?

Writer.

 

That word looks so lonely. Every author has heard the proverbial, “Writing is the loneliest profession.”

Really.

We spend countless hours in front of the keyboard, with our imaginary and sometimes not so imaginary friends.

Think about it, if you write 750 words per hour (a decent clip, about what I average when I’m rolling) that means in the best case scenario, that’s 133 hours for a 100,000 word novel. In other words if you wrote for a solid five hours per day, it would work out to roughly 27 days—month and a week if you believe in weekends. Continue reading “A Matter of Perspective”

Spotlight on…Susanne O’Leary

 

Reviewer Cathy Speight

Susanne O’Leary is Swedish and married to an Irishman, whose job took them to many countries, so of course she is, enviably, widely travelled. She has used her experience and knowledge of the different countries she has visited to great advantage in her novels to diversify their settings and backdrop.

Her English is impeccable, and one would never know from her novels that English isn’t her first language. Of her many books, I have read A Woman’s Place and Sonja’s Place; these are accounts of the lives of her Great-aunt Julia and her daughter (Sonja), taken from diaries Susanne found in her grandmother’s belongings. The third of Susanne’s books I have read is a contemporary romance, Finding Margo. Continue reading “Spotlight on…Susanne O’Leary”