The Word Cloud

Just to show you that being an author is not all flouncing around considering well-crafted insights, we have snapped Harry hard at work signing copies of his new book and slaving over the envelopes to send them out to the lucky winners.

As many of you Word Clouders know Emma Darwin & Debi Alper are multi-talented, fab, kind, clever and all round 'good eggs' who teach our  6 Week Online Course Self-Editing Your Novel.
Bookings have opened for their next session of Self-Editing which starts on 18th June

This course is designed for those of who have already completed a manuscript or who have completed a major chunk of it. Debi & Emma will teach you  the crucial skills involved in wrenching that first draft into shape. And remember: writing is re-writing. The important bit starts now!

Week One - Plot & Structure, Week Two - Character, Week Three - Voice, Week Four - Point of View and Psychic Distance, Week Five - Prose Microscope, Week Six - Over to You

Some of you may remember the Prose Microscope Emma did for 0ne 'lucky' Cloudie last year - it was revelatory for many of you and as she said - this is what they do on the course in week 5
So sharpen those pencils, lid-off the red pen and embrace Self-Editing with the wonder women!

We have a few spaces still available on our fab 10 week online How to Write A Novel Course that starts this weekend.
 If you are at an intermediate level and have been writing for a little while but still want to learn the key tools of writing then think about getting some help.   If you want to learn all the tricks of the trade and get proper guidance on skills and techniques then this course is ideal. Tutor Rebecca Connell will take you through exercises, tutorials  and give feedback on your work all within a private group on the Cloud.
If you want to acquire writing skills to last a lifetime then this course is the answer.

For less than £40 a week you have advice and guidance from a successfully published author who knows and understands the market and what it takes to write a bestseller

Bookings can be made here

Week One: Ideas and Concepts, Week Two: Openings, Week Three: Settings,  Week Four: Aspects of Style, 1, Week Five: Aspects of Style, 2.,  Week Six: Finding your Voice, Week Seven: Characterisation and Inner Worlds, Week Eight: Plotting and Structure, Week Nine: Rewriting and self-editing, Week Ten: Endings, agents and sources of help.

Warning - I am quite possibly going to stir a bit of controversy here. That's not really my intention, but after years of reading self pubbed stuff, from a friend of mine who self-published her entire fantasy trilogy 12 years ago (well before the trend) to stuff posted on various sites such as Fictionpress to the Kindle app for my laptop and now, finally, a proper Kindle, I've come to a conclusion.

I can see exactly why a good 80+% of the books available never found a publisher.

However, the plot thickens, because this, in general, does not apply to Cloudies. And I am not just saying that because I am a Cloudie and consider fellow Cloudies my friends.

Yesterday, I downloaded 6 books, and I read the first chapter of all of them. Of all of them, the only one that felt like a 'proper published book' was Bren's. That's not to say I didn't like the other ones I downloaded - I did, and I will read them - but I couldn't help but notice the adverbial redundancies ('the door slammed loudly'. Can a door slam in any other way?), excessive description (and that's coming from me!!) and weird details (for example: '...my throat constricted thirty-five percent as a desire to cry tingled behind my eyes.' Uh, that's oddly specific, but okay...). Things that, whether we like it or not at first, are expunged from our writing here - and for a good reason!

Reading self-pubbed stuff is always an eye-opener. There are gems to be found amongst the dross, but more interestingly (for me), it allows an unfettered glimpse into what other people see as 'good writing'. It's fascinating, to say the least.

It also makes me even more aware of how important it is to get someone without an invested interest to vet your works before doing anything with it! O_o

So, in a roundabout way, I guess I'm trying to say 'bloody hell, we're good here...' ^^D

 

We are thrilled, delighted & tickled every shade of pink to announce that the Greenhouse Literary Agency, in conjunction with the Festival of Writing, has created the Greenhouse Funny Prize for children’s writers. Greenhouse’s Julia Churchill loves every kind and flavour of children’s writing, but she doesn’t get enough submissions that make her laugh. So help her out. Enter the prize. You could win representation from her and a ticket to the Festival of Writing besides. What’s not to like? Here’s Julia:

ANNOUNCING THE GREENHOUSE FUNNY PRIZE – OPEN TO UK/IRISH WRITERS

I’m excited about something. The UK side of the Greenhouse is running a prize in conjunction with this year’s Writers’ Workshop Festival of Writing. It will be called the Greenhouse Funny Prize.

At Greenhouse we love all sorts of writing. We love edgy, wincingly close-to-the-bone YA fiction, we love thrilling, commercial concepts with big surprises, and beautiful and heartfelt younger stories. I could keep going, but in short, we love quality. And there’s something that Sarah and I agree that we don’t see enough of: Funny.

I had the idea for a prize because every time I sit down with an editor and ask what they’re looking for, they generally say, ‘Funny. We need humour’. When I was little, half of my reading was humour – Dahl, the Ahlbergs, JUST WILLIAM, MR MAJEIKA, WHAT-A-MESS, FUDGE, ASTERIX. And there is loads of great humour on the market today – WIMPY KID, Andy Stanton, Lauren Child, Dave Pilkey, David Walliams. Funny is selling in the shops, publishers are wide open to it, and yet we don’t see that represented in our submissions inbox. We want more laughs.

The Greenhouse Funny prize is open to un-agented writers who are currently resident in the UK and Ireland. Entries will be judged by me and guest judge Leah Thaxton, Publisher of Egmont Children’s Books (and discoverer of Andy Stanton).

The winner will get an offer of representation from the Greenhouse and a full weekend ticket to the wonderful Festival of Writing that runs 7-9 September ’12 (worth £525). The winner will also be presented with a bottle of champagne at the Festival’s gala dinner on the Saturday night. The runners up will each get five of my favourite funny books, and maybe even a comedy mug.

Our judging criteria is very simple. Funny, and we are wide open to all ages. The winner may be a picture book like OLIVIA or DON’T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS, or a young series à la HORRID HENRY, FLAT STANLEY, THE GREAT HAMSTER MASSACRE or UNDEAD PETS, or for 8-12 year olds like Lemony Snicket or RAMONA. It could even be for teen readers, like Louise Rennison, DOES MY HEAD LOOK BIG IN THIS? or THE PRINCESS DIARIES. It’s going to be the person with funny in their DNA.

Funny is subjective, of course. Perhaps the winner will have a slow-burning, sly wit. Perhaps a Python-esque sense of the absurd. Or maybe the concept, and the freshness and immediacy of it, will do much of the heavy lifting.

Entry guidelines:

To get a good sense of the voice and where the character is headed, we’d like to see the first 5,000 words PLUS a short description (a few lines) of the book AND a one page outline that shows the spine of the plot.

If you are submitting a picture book (or shorter fiction that comes in under 5,000 words), then send the complete text.

Please send your entries to funny@greenhouseliterary.com

The deadline for submissions is Monday 30 July.

You must be resident in the UK or Ireland.

The shortlist will be announced Monday 6 August. We anticipate that 6 writers will be shortlisted.

The winner will be announced Monday 13 August. If we get two or more outstanding entries, we may offer representation to more than one writer.

Entrants will not be acknowledged on receipt, but all entrants will be emailed when the shortlist is announced.

In the meantime, if you want to book a place at the Festival of Writing, please go ahead and do so. If the winner of the Greenhouse Funny Prize has already booked for the Festival, the Writers’ Workshop will refund your money and (if needed) upgrade your ticket.

Yesterday was our first ever village Book Festival. You may remember a while ago that I blogged to ask for help with competition ideas. Well, thanks to all the Cloudie help I received, the competitions were a resounding success (as was the day in general) and we're already talking about what lessons we have learned this year ready for next year - we must be mad!

So, thanks to all of you who replied with suggestions and special thanks to Barb who allowed me to use her book covers competition, Whisks who constructed some fantastic book title anagrams and Geri who photo-shopped some extra book covers for me. You're all stars :-D

No one reads short stories any more. Well, not if we're to believe the mainstream publishers, they don't.  Single Author collections are rare indeed. Yet people still love writing them.

In his introduction to Alice Monro's superb collection 'Runaway', Jonathan Franzen speaks up for the Cinderella of fiction, saying...I like stories because they leave the writer no place to hide.
He  names literary giants like John Updike and William Trevor, fine novelists, but 'who seem to me most at home, most undilutedly themselves in their shorter work.'

I would agree, and I think this is because the short form allows writers freedom to explore. We don't have to worry about categories or target readership. We write what we must, and who knows where the stuff comes from or where it's going to.

As someone who has had a few novels traditionally published, you may wonder why I'm plugging my own little collection here. Fact is, while I've been lucky enough to see many of my stories published individually, it's long been a dream to see some of them nestled together between the covers of a single volume. Yes, I know. Dream on! Then I got a Kindle for Christmas and thought...hmm...why not?

So here it is - My Life in a Nutshell - six (quite long) short stories, a good rainy weekend read and all for the price of a cup of tea! If you enjoy shorts you might fancy hitting the link below, and checking out the blurb.

Forgive the shameless self-promotion by the way. It doesn't come easy. But seeing as it's Friday, I'm hoping you might all be in a good mood!




http://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Life-Nutshell-ebook/dp/B007R4WJQK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1334926033&sr=1-1

I'm not alone on the Cloud in having a new book out there, and I'm sure I'm not alone in having spent maybe more time than necessary in the last few weeks fretting about Facebook pages, and whether I should be on Twitter, and rankings and ratings and reviews.

I read a wonderfully calming piece in "The Author" by Terence Blacker. I have attempted to find it online but no luck, so I'll quote a few snippets here. The gist of it all is that authors should worry their writerly, non-publicity-minded heads less about these things and downsize, simplify.

"First on the bonfire of trivialities will be endorsements from other authors...the familiar, shop-worn compliments ('sparkling debut''gripping yarn''an exciting new voice') are so ubiquitous that they have ceased to mean anything to writer or reader"

"The truly pure in spirit will continue their professional spring cleaning by removing from their lives any activity undertaken only for reasons of publicity...To suggest that talking to a magazine about your pets or favourite films, appearing on radio or TV chat shows or trying, like some crazed cult leader, to win 'followers' on Twitter will achieve little or nothing in terms of sales, might be deemed eccentric within publishing, but the wise author will know it is true."

"The very things that embarrass us - tatty clothes, a tendency to express impolitic opinions, a general vagueness about management or the new media - are what earn us respect within the book industry. We are authors, not would-be entrepreneurs or fame-hungry competitors in a TV reality show."

"It is the individual which matters: a good editor, a good reader, and, of course, your good self."

Phew! That does make me feel better. On the other hand, if Charlie Higson does want to endorse my book as a "gripping yarn", I won't say no! 

The thing about Brooklands Museum is you tend to have to know it’s there in order to find it at all. You follow the sign for Brooklands off the last roundabout and find yourself on a road that appears to be heading straight into the Mercedes-Benz complex, as indeed it is. You continue on the road, avoiding any visitors’ car park entrances because you know you don’t want a Mercs and it takes you right round to the back of the complex to the staff car park. Not a word about Brooklands. Dauntless you carry on past the car park on an unmarked road by a canal and round a bend, lo and behold, you see Parking for Brooklands. But you’d have given up long ago if you hadn’t know it was there.

The park is very full and you have to drive a long way past the entrance to find a space. At least its free, you think, as you trudge back to the footbridge over the canal and approach the ticket office.

Aha… You notice the poster in the window about a book-signing today in ‘The Paddock’. You get your ticket, and a site plan and try to figure out the way to The Paddock, noting, conveniently, that the route takes you past the toilets. You make an unscheduled pit-stop and emerge feeling much relieved and head off past a row of garages, or Racing Lock-ups as the site plan calls them, marked Dunlop, Jackson, Shell and BP. Round the corner past the side of The Clubhouse and turn left and you get your first site a blonde vision behind a table laden with paperbacks and all sorts of Bothersome paraphernalia relating to Bermeon.

It can be none other than SecretSpi, Susan Patricia Imgrund – or S. P. Moss as it says on the book cover, and you wonder idly, as you look around at all the old racing cars in the paddock, if the S doesn’t stand for Stirling. You wait for a lull in the mad rush to buy her book – well, you hang about for a few moments while she finishes talking to someone who was passing by, and then your eyes meet, your faces break into silly grins and you both lean across the table to embrace like old friends being re-united, which in a way you are, except there’s no ‘re-’. It’s the first time you’ve met, yet you feel like old friends. It’s an experience you will repeat on many occasions throughout the day. (You don’t mean embracing Secrets, but meeting other ‘old friends’ for the first time.)

You look around and spot the man in the fedora. Got to be AlanP. And the one with the long blonde hair that he’s chatting up? None other than John Taylor (whom you’ve already met a few times, as John Onceupon. This acquaintance is renewed and you are introduced to Alan – and there’s the Pimlico Kid, alias Barry Walsh, looking as suave as his old alias would suggest.

Over the next hour or so you meet again your old pals Whisks and later, Steve, as well as finally getting up close and personal with Heidi from Andorra, Kaz from Kingston, CJ from Portsmouth (Elysia, in a previous incarnation), Athlestone with his lovely Florence, and Mike from a library somewhere in darkest London. You are told that Noodledoodle is also among those present, but is proving rather elusive. You realise later that, with three young Noodles to entertain, she has been touring the whole complex making the most of her visit. You finally run her to earth standing in the queue for a ride round the famous old banked race-track in a vintage, souped-up racer, and have a good old chin wag.

The queue for the vintage rides is conveniently close to Secret’s book-signing table, so not only are many attracted over to view the book while their place in the queue is kept for them, but even when they don’t come over there always looks like a good crowd milling around the area, which is good for business. SecretSpi tells you that she’s selling quite a few and you make that quit a few and one, asking her to sign your copy to your two eldest grandchildren who meet the age criteria perfectly.

During a lull in proceedings, while some others have taken a lead from Noodledoodle’s initiative and gone exploring, you suggest to CJ that you might follow suit. The two of you wander off in the direction of the Wellington Hangar, which is full of the most amazing early (allegedly) flying contraptions as well as later models such as a Wellington bomber that was rescued from Loch Ness, and Barnes Wallace’s ‘dam buster’ bombs.

Emerging from the far end of the hangar, CJ is saying to you, ‘My father used to be a fireman.’ A perfect stranger, who you happen to be passing at this moment, says, ‘Pardon?’ and you bemusedly stop to explain that CJ was talking to you. It emerges that the stranger had already summed up CJ as being your daughter and as she had said, ‘My father used to be a fireman,’ he had to assume that she must be talking to him! Just the sort of bizarre casual remark you make to strangers that you pass in an aviation and motor museum (apparently).

You wander on, learning as you go, how CJ’s actual father managed the transition from driving fire engines to private cars. Not very well, it would seem. You inspect the various old aircraft scattered around like life-size discarded Airfix models on a giant child’s bedroom floor. You climb the steps to board the Sultan of Oman’s (ex-) private Boeing 707 with luxury bathroom (gold basin and taps removed for safe keeping elsewhere), sleeping quarters with double bed complete with safety belt, lounge area with padded armchairs, television, telephone and stereo and a cockpit with more dials and switches than you could shake gold-plated swagger stick at.

Back at The Paddock, book sales seem to be still progressing apace and it’s time to sustain the inner man. You, CJ and three or four others pop across to the Sunbeam Café for a spot of lunch. You go for the baked potato with butter, baked beans, and brie. (It’s actually cheddar, but you go for the alliterative effect – always the writer.) With the others, you take your tray back outside to lunch alfresco in the sunshine at the picnic tables just next to where SecretSpi is developing repetitive strain injury as she continues to sign her books.

Of course it is now that the sky clouds over and when you’re only three-quarters way through your meal the rain drops are falling on your head. SecretSpi and her helpers quickly gather everything together and carry their table over to the covered entrance to the Sunbeam Café while you and a few others brave the inclement conditions rather than foregoing the remainder of your lunch. The drizzle never amounts to much at all and before long SecretSpi is set up again in the sunshine. You and several others remark what a great day it really is for the occasion.

Betwixt and between all this you are snapping away at this and that with your camera, recording it all for posterity, and SecretSpi’s publisher, Kay Green, asks if you can let her have copies, while Cloudies ask if you can capture them risking their lives in a racer – for next of kin, you suppose, if the worst were to happen. Chatting with John and Steve, they plant an idea and, with Steve’s help, you spend some further time around the museum site photographing “The Bother in Burmeon” in divers, if unlikely, positions – on the under-carriage of Concord, in the air intake of a Hawker Hunter, on the bonnet of a 1930s Austin MG and so on. It just seems to you like a good idea at the time.

But time wears on. Some clouds are again starting to drift across the sky and some Cloudies are starting to drift off homewards. The signing table is back under cover to be on the safe side and you make your way over for a final chat with S. P. Moss, the heroine of the hour, who has remained valiantly smiling throughout; a sterling effort. ( A Stirling effort you think, facetiously?) You take your leave, as you have been doing with various others, with a ready hope of renewing acquaintances at other such occasions. You wish SecretSpi all the best and hope she’ll soon be able to relax a bit. Her smile never wavers.

You meander back the way you came, bumping into Mike once more and offering him a lift to Weybridge station to catch his train, and Mike being Mike is perfectly happy to walk. So with a final farewell, you leave the museum and a plethora of happy memories and a general feeling of bonhomie towards The WordCloud, all Cloudies everywhere and to SecretSpi in particular. You glance at her name on the book you are carrying and wonder, just fleetingly, if she could be the secret love-child of a racing driver.

Hello everyone, I’ve been slightly absent from the Cloud just lately, and I thought I might tell you why.

It’s like this. I know Les Floyd via Twitter, Facebook, Lesism (his blog) and the Word Cloud – although I haven’t spotted him here in recent times. But what I have spotted has been a good symbiosis of his blog and twitter. He’s got over 74,000 twitter followers, and he’s managed to fix up some sort of automatic twitter feed so his tweets come through at frequent intervals throughout the twenty-four hour day. What these tweets do is give links to various articles on his blog, where he seems to have many, many visitors.

I’ll quote his blog’s headline so you can see the sort of thing it’s about: ‘After decades of sleepwalking through life, I've finally woken up and realised the greatest dreams are achieved with open eyes and a conscious mind...’ This sort of thing suits some people, of course, and not others, but I find it highly interesting.

I also find it highly interesting that he has so many readers and followers.

But what I find most interesting is that he has found a use for Twitter – as have thousands of others – and as have I – now.

And the reason why I am blogging about it is that many of you may be wondering about the alleged usefulness of Twitter. Authors are exhorted to use Twitter, but what isn’t so clear is how to use it. Well, the answer appears to be – systematically.

Consequently I’ve been busy with a two-pronged campaign: upgrading my blog (so I have somewhere to send people) and building my Twitter following (so I have people to send). The blog upgrade has been largely visual. It hadn’t occurred to me – dur! – that people like pictures, so each post should have an interesting pic with it. Well, that’s been remedied, and the posts have been reworded here and there to give the right approach (especially as many of them have been lifted straight from the Word Cloud and were therefore addressed to Word Cloud readers).

The Twitter upgrade has consisted of following people so they will follow back (and subsequently unfollowing those who don’t). It’s a slow business and there are hucksters (whom I avoid) offering to get you 10,000 followers for $80 or some such. (What sort of followers, I wonder?) Anyway, I’ve got to 1,134 followers as I write – not many, but a heck of a lot more than the 160 I had a couple of weeks ago.

So what? Well, I’ve got a book to promote, not mine, but one I have an interest in. As some of you may be aware, Chris – aka C J Fenge – aka Mrs Me – is due to have her teenage fantasy/thriller, The Salamander Stone, published on Monday 2^nd April – only digitally at first, but the trade paperback version should follow a few weeks after. (I say, ‘only digitally’ although I’ve just read a book on Kindle and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s the future, folks, we’ve just got to get used to it.)

Anyway, I shall have 1,134 or more people to tweet to about the book. And I know how to send out automated 24 hour tweets – and I know how many such tweets I can tolerate from other tweeters such as Les Floyd, so I’ll use that as a guide. Prime time for promotion is apparently the first week of publication, after which it is best to slacken off for fear of alienating readers. What my tweets will do is direct people to a variety of blog posts, such as:-

 

·       ‘The Salamander Stone’: read about the Pinterest Board http://bit.ly/A6PeOq

·       A Writing Partnership: A Matter of Love and Passion http://bit.ly/xNaetH

·       ‘The Salamander Stone’: take a look at the cover http://bit.ly/yCyVzN

·       A Sonnet of Celebration: ‘Tribute To A Lady Novelist Who Merits Encomiums Superior To Those Which Now Ensue’ http://bit.ly/ykXJjf

 

I’ll add other tweets to link people to Chris’s website (available in the next couple of days) and, of course, to part of her first chapter.

 Then, to stop people getting sick of the same thing, I’ll intersperse all these with other links (which some of you may remember) such as:-

 

·       Thoughts on Mother’s Day: A Moment of Contact http://bit.ly/GBR9aA

·       The Lost Gospels: What Really Happened 2000 Years Ago? http://bit.ly/xc8yJT

·       Science and Religion: Can they be Friends or Must they be Enemies?  http://bit.ly/ydPx4h

·       Royal Weddings and Sacred Marriages: The Ancient Erotic and the Recent Respectable   http://bit.ly/ioQ1wF

 

Finally, beyond all that, I feel duty bound to slip in a few spontaneous tweets. Here are some of the spontaneous ones I did yesterday (rather enjoyed them):-

 

·       Taking my shadow for a walk – midday he just wants to point north. Doesn’t matter what I do – run, jump, stroll – he only wants north

·       Sociable chap my shadow. Mixes it with whoever we pass – tree shadow, wall shadow, fence shadow – he just loves to get in there and mingle

·       Started heading south – shadow sulked behind me like it’s the last direction he wants. I turned north, and he loved it, stretching way ahead

·       I’ll say this for my shadow, he’s not choosy. He’ll slide over any sort of ground – potholes, dog stuff, mud – he’ll crawl over the lot

In conclusion, of course, I must add that if any fellow Twits feel moved to retweet any of my promotional tweets next week I shall be as grateful as grateful can be. (Word Cloud Twits of the world unite!)