Robert C. Day's Blog, page 53

Maturity

The sudden realisation that you can no longer post thoughts like ‘she had a face that looked as if someone had done a sour trump under her nose’ anymore.

Happy

I like being happy. I like the feeling of happiness in my head and heart – a kind of airy feeling as if I’m hyperventilating, sneezing, yawning,falling asleep, or waking up.

Thereis a theory that happiness comes about automatically when we put a proper smile on our face – one that involves the eyes. There is even something called Laughter Therapy that aims to make us happyby inducing an artificial laugh. They say that the laughter becomes genuine after a while.

But these are made up things, b...

Being

We are all ‘being’ in one way or another – it’s unavoidable. But some ways of being are better than others. Being kind and loving feels better than being cruel and impatient.

Why is this so?

When we are kind to someone, it increases the chance that they will be kind to us. And when we are cruel we will often find thatthe person we are being cruel to, gives us the same treatment back, which makes us feel unpleasant.

But wait – does it have to be that way?

When someone is cruel to me, how can I...

Egyptian Funerary Art

Choosing the perfect cover for your book is important for many reasons – here are a few of them:

Snap decisions. People browsing for books, whether in the store or on Amazon (other online retailers are available) spend an average offive seconds looking at your cover (and a furtherthirteen seconds reading the bumph, if the coverpasses muster)before deciding whether to buy, or move on. Quality control. If the coverhas acheap look and feel,then it is often assumed that the words inside will be...

Mathematics

The first scene in a book must have the following things added in:

Your protagonist. Just as a duckling will assume that the first moving thing it sees is its mother and follow it around, yourreader will assume that the first character encountered in your book is your protagonist. You, therefore, need to ensure that your readers can identify with this character. Give them something about your main man (or woman) to hang their hat on, be it memorable, endearing, quirky or flawed. The catalyst...

Numerology

Themystical or divine connection between the properties of numbers and aspects of human life mean that we can use numerology to discover the power of many things, including potential book titles.

Each letter of the alphabet can be assigned to a number in this way:

Each number then has certain qualities:

1 –Individualistic and independent, showing leadership and drive. 2 –Sensitive, tactful, diplomatic and cooperative. 3 – Imaginative, expressive communicative and artistic. 4 – Disciplined,...

Ma’at

In search of thetruth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice of the matter,I investigateddeeper into why we should notuse variants of the verb ‘to be’ (am, is, are, was, were, be, and been), and looked at what we should use instead.

Beginning with the question: “How do you translate: ‘there was thought …’ into something not using ‘was’ and retaining the past continuous tense?”

Identifyforms of ‘to be’ verbs in your writing (e.g. is, am, was, were, being andbeen).
e.g. #1 –There...

Perfume

These word types perfume writing rather than accentuate its beauty:

Be Verbs (am, is, are, was, were, be, and been) Zombie Nouns (nominalizationsending with ion, ism, ty, ment, ness, ance, ence) Prepositions (in, by, for, of andto when used in an infinitive verb construction) Adjectives and Adverbs (words ending with able, ac, al, ant, ary, ent, ful, ible, ic, ive, less, ly andous) Waste Words(is, that, then, there).

Removethese wordsand achieve leanand mean, rather than fat and flabby, pro...

Judgement Day

The point at which your manuscript is presented to eyes other than your own is Judgement Day. This may well be the time that you find out whether you have created a monster or not. They shall find thee out and thou shalt be judged according to whether thou art full of promise or there be a severe lack in thy works.

Seriously – if you feel that you’re writing a load of rubbish, then you should stop.

Cremation

Scenario – you just finished writing your masterpiece. Triumphant, you put it to one side for a couple of weeks and take a break. Refreshed, you pick it up again, start reading and it is the biggest pile of rubbish you have ever read.

What do you do?

One option is to builda bonfireout of all those pages of closely written text, light it up, then watch it burn it to the ground!

But wait? Maybe there is another option: editing!

First drafts of pretty much all things are … rubbish. Second drafts...