Ruth’s Blog
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Are ‘place’ and ‘pace’ mutually incompatible in a story?
It was a sixteen hour journey from Vancouver to Wellington and from northern hemisphere autumn to southern hemisphere spring, and now here I am on a glorious day, with flowers and blossom, blue sky, sunshine. Bliss. Rain in Auckland gave way to brilliant light on...
Home thoughts from abroad on self-publishing
As soon as I get on a plane, this happens. In the days before actually setting off on a trip my head is full of logistical arrangements, blocking out the deeper bigger picture of what I'm doing and planning. As soon as the seat belt snaps on, the noise clears and my...
Trying -again – to find an agent; why bother?
Maybe it was thinking about my blog on the ‘fear of failure’ and how it applied to me. Maybe it was reading a post on Twitter from a literary agent, explaining her admiration for ‘commercial women’s fiction’, or CWF as she called it. Maybe it was thinking about the...
Fear of Failure
Last Saturday I led my first ever workshop on self-publishing, at the Borderlines book festival in Carlisle. Considering I've been running workshops for twenty five years, and had been thinking about this one for weeks - I blogged about it at the end of July - I was...
Am I on another treadmill?
I've worked hard all my life, because I had to support myself and my child in the early days, and more recently for reasons other than earning enough to live on. As a self-employed education consultant I worked because it was fun, and creative and occasionally...
It’s show time!
Last weekend I went to Gosforth Show, my first and possibly my only local show of the season. The summer months here in Cumbria are stuffed with shows: from July to September there's one every Saturday and Sunday, and sometimes mid-week as well. Some are small, some...
Do we really want more money, whatever the price?
Last week brought the annual visit to the accountan for a review of the year's business for 'Ruth Sutton Ltd' and discussion about the coming year. As I anticipated and had planned for, my 'real work' as an education consultant is finally winding down after 27 very...
Is there life off-line?
I wonder how long it will take BT OpenReach to find our remote village and get the problem on my telephone line fixed? Until then I'm reduced to going to my daughter's down the road or to the local cafe to get online, and it feels different, as if I'm encroaching on...
Can you extend your books’ ‘shelf-life’?
One of my gripes about writing and selling novels based where I live, in West Cumbria, is that some booksellers insist on describing them as 'local fiction' and condemn them to an out-of-the-way corner of the shop labelled 'local books', far away from anything...
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