Ruth’s Blog
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Talking about my books
Tomorrow evening I'll be talking to the 'Friends of Whitehaven Museum' about the Jessie Whelan trilogy, which has the overall title 'Between the Mountains and the Sea'. It could be quite a large group, some of whom may have read all three books and others may not even...
Swanning off to Swanage
This week has been ridiculously busy, even by my standards, and the evenings seem to have been divided between music concerts (2), football matches and cricket on TV (too many hours to contemplate) and watering the veggies. After the usual scramble and frustrations of...
Looking for a villain
All the characters I've developed so far in my writing have been flawed in one way or another - Jessie is impulsive, John so unassertive, Maggie ambitious, Violet blinkered by her religion - but all of them are essentially good people. If, as I'm considering, I turn...
How I (almost) walked the Cumbria Way
I'm back at home, and smiling as I re-read my last post where I was speculating about how it would be to walk the Cumbria Way. What's the phrase I'm groping for - how misguided could I have been? in your dreams Ruthie! you must be kidding? Any of those would do....
Walking through history
I won't be posting a blog piece for a week or so, while I'm doing a long walk through Cumbria, from Carlisle in the north to Ulverston in the south, via Caldbeck, Skiddaw, Rosthwaite, Elterwater and Torver. For those of you who know this region, those names have...
Is the ‘local book’ label useful?
I searched on the bookshop shelf in a nearby market town but my books were not there. I asked at the counter. 'Oh, they're in the 'local' section,' I was told, 'in the back room'. What could I say? True, my books are set in a recogniseable area, and local people who...
What makes a good book cover?
A couple of years ago, when my first novel was in production, my 'book designer' asked me to go to a bookshop and look at covers. 'See what you like,' he said, 'and what will make people want to buy your book. Then we can give Kevin the cover designer some direction...
Can you teach someone how to write fiction?
There was such a huge response to my post on the question 'Can you teach writing?' that I decided to add some more, so here it is. I didn’t make this stuff up: I learned it from my own painful experience, and from great guides like Andrew Pyper, Matthew Hall and...
Can you teach writing?
'Once a teacher, always a teacher': I think that's true, and being a teacher - however long ago - makes you permanently and irredeemably critical of how information and ideas are presented. Although I've not taught school students for many years, I make part of my...
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