Ruth’s Blog
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The anti-climax of completion
Yesterday morning a strange feeling came over me, a sense of loss and uncertainty, a long way from the delight and celebration I'd anticipated at 'The End', the final words of the new novel. In the final week, for six days straight from first thing in the morning...
Self-publishing: getting it right
WARNING People write books about this: one blog post can cover only the bare bones We can split the process of going from story in your head to books available to readers (in whatever form) into three parts. As a self-published writer, you're on your own: whatever...
Zen and the art of writing
Arriving on a Caribbean island is an object lesson in slowing down. It didn't help that four planes arrived at once, but the line for passport and customs checks took nearly two hours. Friday night traffic jammed the road from the airport, and by the time we had...
Goodbye and good riddance to the hardback ‘literary’ novel?
The papers this weekend are commenting on, and apparently bemoaning, the decline in sales of the 'literary' novel over the past two years. Some of the articles suggest that sales of this or that novel might increase when it's published in paperback, usually a year or...
The positive power of feedback
All my plans for meeting readers at the Lake District shows this summer went west the moment I fell down the stairs in mid-August and emerged with a ruptured Achilles tendon and damaged shoulder ligaments. Couldn't walk for a while, couldn't drive, couldn't lift or...
Do villains need likeable traits?
Maybe it's the optimist or the humanist in me, or just naïveté, but I have trouble reading or writing about a character who is unquestionably and irredeemably wicked to the core. I recognise that such characters are can be useful to a simple story. From pantomime...
‘Once over lightly’?
At one of the first residential writing courses I went on, many years ago, the special guest one evening was a published author - one novel - who was invited to talk to us about his writing process. He seemed quite grumpy and I wondered if he'd been having a bad day....
A sense of ‘place’: how accurate do you need to be?
I live in Cumbria, the most north-westerly county of England, and one of the most beautiful. Both sides of my family came from here, it was the place where all my childhood holidays were spent, and when I moved back here to live twelve years ago it felt like coming...
First audiobook!
At last, it's done! I started on this project months ago, thought about it, blogged about it, struggled with the abridging, rehearsed, found a recording studio, got help and did it. Then the master discs sat and looked at me for a while: what was the point of all that...
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