Pam Baddeley's Blog, page 3

Slight Detour

ClkrFreeVectorImages, Pixabay, Public Domain

Since finishing the ‘big push’ under CampNaNoWriMo things have languished a little, with some work done on chapter 29 that I’m still not satisfied with. This week I did some writing – but not on the edit. Instead, I polished (again) three old short stories to submit to a couple of competitions. Three, because I finished one then realised the rules for the comp where I’d intended to submit it would rule it out as published although it appeared ma...

CampNaNoWriMo – Final Report

Unsplash, Pixabay, public domain

Using CampNaNoWriMo as motivation certainly was a good idea. Despite some fallow days when I didn’t manage anything on the edit, I exceeded my initial goal (20 hours editing = 20,000 words on Camp) by day 12, and upped it to 40 hours/40,000 equivalent. By the time I validated on 26 April, I had managed to break through the 47 hour barrier. Since then, I’ve managed another couple of sessions and have finished with a healthy 54 hours of editing. The outcome o...

Back in the Saddle

Tinogasta by tpsdave on Pixabay, Public domain

CampNaNoWriMo is well underway now, and although I’ve had some days of total distraction where absolutely nothing got done, I’ve more or less been able to stick to a pattern of working every other day. So far, I’ve almost met my original goal of 20,000 (editing equivalent is 20 hours and I am actually editing). Yesterday, I increased the goal to 40,000 as I think it is do-able, having seen how I’ve progressed so far. I didn’t want to start off...

Camping out under the Writerly Stars

It’s that time again as April commences – CampNaNoWriMo. I’ve joined a cabin with a couple of other writers I know, with the intent of really getting down to the edit. I’ve done a bit more in the past week; another couple of chapters slowly edited.

Tooktime out to do a review on a submission for the email writers’ group to which I belong, and also finally got round tosetting up a Twitter account. I went through the chapter in Catherine Ryan Howard’s book, Self-PrintedThe Sane Person’s Guid...

Slight Derailment

Train wreck at Montparnasse, 1895, public domain

Well, not such good progress the past couple of weeks: sat down at the machine a few times, then ended up doing other stuff rather than the edit. Especially as there were a few IT issues. So I only managed to edit up to chapter 15 inclusive. But I did write a short story for a competition on a blog,The Cult of Me,which runs 500 word story comps every month, based on an image. I had looked at the competitions previously and couldn’t get “insp...

Chipping Away at the Stone

So … at last I re-embarked on the edit after the vast number of distractions in the past two months. Went over the first four chapters again with some more nitpicking things recommended this time on SFF Chronicles, such as overuse of common words. That just about met my last ROW80 target, though I went over by a couple of days.

Since then, I’ve managed to carry out that exercise plus the original nitpickers I was looking for and the change of tabbed layout to style based layout, right up t...

Buzzing Around the Tree of Life

OK, so I finally managed to upgrade this main site. Had some issues (as I knew I would because my other sites don’t have blogs), but I managed to resolve them all or found acceptable workrounds, apart from one that is beyond my control (see below re the ROW80 links). The job is now done and can be ticked off the to-do list and possibly I can now find a bit of concentration to return to the painstaking final edit! Should have put the website upgrade down as a ROW80 goal

Swan Legs Peddling

by PublicDomainImages on Pixabay

You know the old cliche about the swan? All serene on the surface and peddling away like mad beneath? It’s been a bit like that this week, what with the distraction of Goodreads, Facebook and other forum posting. But something has been happening behind the scenes, without being visible or furthering the cause of editing the WIP, unfortunately. Another call upon the time of the writer of today: maintaining websites.

As this is a bit of an anorack subject, I...

Building an Author Platform

Over the last few years, authors have been bombarded with the ‘advice’ that they must have an author platform, consisting of a blog, Facebook account, Twitter account and quite often accounts on other sites such as Goodreads. The corresponding moan among writers is that these things take up a huge amount of time and don’t allow you to write, which is the whole point of things after all!

Up till now, I’ve been a bit slow getting going. On the plus side, I did start this blog a few years ago...

Must Try Harder….

… or something. Despite best intentions, I have not managed to blog for nearly six months (groan) after two posts in July, one of which represented a lot of research into book covers that I thought people would find useful, so it was disappointing not to receive feedback.

Never mind! This isn’t meant to be a right old moan. Instead, I want to do a catchup to cover what I’ve been doing writing-wise, which isn’t as much as I wanted, due to health issues. But I did at least manage NaNoWriMo in N...