Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 42
October 23, 2013
Nanowrimo plans, & another excerpt from Island of Glass for #WIPpet Wednesday
No original posts from me last week — I was too busy preparing for the Villa Diodati workshop, reading the stories for critique and whipping the beginning of A Wasted Land into shape. It was wonderful, but more on that in a separate post.
I’ve decided to do Nanowrimo after all this year, and will “use” it to hopefully finish A Wasted Land. Yes, I know that’s against the rules, but anything to spur me on, right? 
Right now, the novel is at almost exactly 25,000 words, which will make it very e...
October 22, 2013
Amazon Makes Life Easier For Authors of Historical & Literary Fiction
Reblogged from David Gaughran:
There are lots of reasons why self-publishing success stories tend to concentrate around writers of "genre" fiction, but it's a mistake to assume that success is impossible if you write literary fiction or historical fiction (which tends to get lumped in with literary fiction, even though it's just another genre... like literary fiction!).
The first is demographics: romance and erotica readers were the first to switch to digital, followed by mystery and thriller...
October 15, 2013
Kobo Cull Self-Published Titles In Knee-jerk Response To Tabloid Clickbait
Reblogged from David Gaughran:
A media firestorm erupted in the UK on Sunday after a tabloid story about WH Smith selling “filth” alongside books aimed at children, which has resulted in Kobo culling huge numbers of self-published titles – most of which have no erotic content whatsoever.
It’s hard to know exactly how many titles Kobo has pulled. What we do know is that…
I was thinking about writing a blog post about this, but David Gaughran beat me to it, of course. :)...
October 11, 2013
Cover drafts for Facets of Glass, the second book of The Glassmakers
Yesterday, I got the initial cover designs for the second book of the Glassmakers trilogy back from my cover artist, the lovely and talented Rachel Cole of Littera Designs. For the first book in the series, I bought a beautiful pre-made cover:
Since I want the other books to have the same look and design, I recently hired Rachel to do covers for Facets of Glass and Shards of Glass, even though they are still only in the brainstorming phase. Here are her drafts for the second novella in the tr...
October 9, 2013
First results with Pomodoro, and an excerpt from Island of Glass for #WIPpet Wednesday
Today I’ve been applying the Pomodoro technique for the first time to try and become more disciplined about the tasks on my to-do list, and I’m quite pleased with the results so far. Once I’ve been working with it longer, I will write a post on it in more detail, assuming it continues to work for me.
Most of what I’ve been doing today, however, has been the Big Translation Project. I don’t have much in the way of new material for A Wasted Land, although I’ve spent a lot of time on it in the...
October 8, 2013
Deliberate practice and the next round of goals
For this Round of Words, Kait has challenged us to keep “deliberate practice” in mind when putting together our goals. I’m going to take her up on it, and in this round I want to concentrate on FOCUS and becoming more effective with the time I have. I’ve downloaded a program for the Pomodoro technique, a time management tool, and I’m going to try out the program Freedom with it, which shuts off the Internet for a specific amount of time. Before my writing sessions, I will also work on plannin...
September 25, 2013
More from A Wasted Land for #WIPpet Wednesday
I’m not getting around to much blogging these days other than WIPpet Wednesday, it seems! I feel dreadfully behind on just about everything, like I will never be able to catch up. But at least I can post an excerpt.
On WIPpet Wednesday, a bunch of us writers post something from a Work in Progress, a passage that is somehow related to the date. You can view the other excerpts here, and you’re welcome to join in the fun!
My math for today: 9+25+13=47. I’m giving you a short excerpt from page 4...
September 24, 2013
The 20 Year Overnight Success: Interview with Michael Wallace
Reblogged from David Gaughran:
I have an interview today with Michael Wallace, an author who has sold over 400,000 e-books since he started self-publishing back in January 2011.
Michael patiently took the time over several days to answer my questions about writing, marketing, the craft, and the business.Given the length of the interview, and because I didn't want to cut any of the great answers he gave, I'm posting this over two days.
Here's a great interview with su...
September 19, 2013
Quarterly update and a cover reveal for Gawain and Ragnell
It’s that time of year again, taking stock on how well I’ve achieved my goals in the last couple of months for “A Round of Words in 80 Days.” For those who are unfamiliar with ROW80, you can check it out here.
First off, to get it out of the way, here are the goals I didn’t achieve:
- I did NOT manage to get 50,000 words written on A Wasted Land
- I did NOT do much more experimenting with posting to Wattpad and similar sites
- I only managed to do a few experimental fast writing sessions, not e...
Quartely update and a cover reveal for Gawain and Ragnell
It’s that time of year again, taking stock on how well I’ve achieved my goals in the last couple of months for “A Round of Words in 80 Days.” For those who are unfamiliar with ROW80, you can check it out here.
First off, to get it out of the way, here are the goals I didn’t achieve:
- I did NOT manage to get 50,000 words written on A Wasted Land
- I did NOT do much more experimenting with posting to Wattpad and similar sites
- I only managed to do a few experimental fast writing sessions, not e...
