Marc Nobbs's Blog, page 7

The Magic & The Memories – Reflecting on My Son’s Youth Orchestra Journey

I recently attended my son's last performance in the UK with the local County Youth Orchestra and it triggered a lot of emotion and a lot of memories.

It was a little before 3 pm on a cold, miserable Sunday afternoon at the end of June when my wife, my daughter and I took our seats in the small theatre at a local school. Having arrived about ten minutes prior, we’d been watching two young ...

SubStacks and “Real Life” Writing

About a month ago I started a SubStack under my legal name. The point of doing that was to get me writing again after a sustained period of inactivity. I know full well that one of the secrets to being a good writer is to write. Anything. It doesn’t matter, just write. Ideally, every day.

That was the point of starting the Stack. To get me writing, if not every day, then at least more often than I was. There didn’t need to be a theme, just write.

In one month, I’ve publis...

A Quick Update

Quick UpdateI've been making some progress on the fourth Paul Robertson Novel - plus, website updates

I thought it was time I issued an update of where I am with things because I’m still getting plenty of messages asking me for the status of the fourth (and hopefully final) Paul Robertson book.

The last time I gave you an update was back in October—that’s nine months ago. As is always the case when I disap...

Continuity Challenges & the Art of Retcon

The biggest problem I find myself facing as I write both the fourth Paul Robertson book and the third Lies Series book is continuity. The last thing I want is to put these books out there for the public to read, and have the more eagle-eyed readers say, “Hey, didn’t you say in book two that…”

I guess that’s the price you pay when you create a whole Universe and write within, with interconnected characters and stories that take place at the same as other stories in the same universe.

Fo...

I’ve always been a Writer

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. Mostly fiction, but some non-fiction too. I enjoy it. I enjoy being able to organise my thoughts and clear my head by writing those thoughts and dreams down (or typing them out).

I remember even as far back as Year 7 (or “1st Year” as it was when I was in secondary school), at the age of eleven and twelve, writing two “long” (long for a twelve-year-old, that is—they both covered several pages in my school workbook) stories that, despite being l...

When the Words Flow

As you know I’m working on the fourth book in the Paul Roberston Saga at the moment, provisionally titled An Everlasting Love. Things had been moving along quite nicely. I’d written about twenty-five thousand words and introduced a few ideas and characters that would be important to the story and then…

Then I hit a wall.

Which was annoying. I hit a wall and couldn’t write my way past it.

Even more annoying, it was something really, really stupid that I was banging up against. Want t...

It Just Annoys Me

In my last post, I wrote about a particular book I’m reading from StoriesOnline and concentrated on its length and my feelings that it was Too Much of a Good Thing simply because it’s longer than I feel it needs to be.

I mentioned in that post that there are some techniques that the author is using that are pricking the senses of my inner editor and that one of those is contributing to the inflated word count.

There are other things the author is doing that have me rolling my eyes – an...

Word Count & Reading Times

Following on from yesterday’s post, I wasted a couple of hours of the weekend putting together a spreadsheet that lists the word count and reading times of various commercial books and some of the longest and most popular books on StoriesOnline – oh, and my own books.

The spreadsheet is embedded here. The green highlights represent the full word count of a whole series. The orange highlights are my own books and the darker orange are my own series.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Some say that to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader.

I’m not a great reader. I’m a decent reader, but I’m not great. I know people who read upwards of two hundred novels a year – that’s over four a week! I’m more like one every four weeks – there’s too much else demanding of my time if I’m honest, but I do enjoy reading, and I read when I can, even if it’s just half an hour or an hour a day.

On the loo is a good time and place to read given there’s a Kindle app for your pho...

I Did it Again, Didn’t I?

The title says it all really, doesn’t it? I did that thing where I start the year off really well, do lots of regular posts and shit, then just kind of stop for the middle part of the year before picking it up in the autumn and going “Sorry, I’ve just been really busy.”

That, of course, is the problem with being an amateur author – or maybe “hobbyist” author is a better description.

Writing as Marc Nobbs is a hobby. It always has been. Would I like to make it my career? Yes, of course,...