Not just Sherlock Holmes
At our writing group, the Lichfield Writers, one of our members mentioned how much she enjoyed M.C.Beaton’s books. As we were going out of the library where we meet, I noticed the latest Beaton, Dead Ringer, on the Rapid Reads shelf (books which have just come in and you must get through them in a week because other people want to get hold of them). So I picked it up, and…
Oh, the thrill of being a writer and editor. Just walked into the local undertaker’s to ask where the nearest mortuary is. Asking for a friend, you understand.
As someone who has been asked to provide reviews of others’ books (and has sometimes failed to provide them – mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), and also as someone who writes books and welcomes reviews, this is a subject about which I have opinions.
When I published my first book, Beneath Gray Skies, I was convinced, as are all new authors, that I had written a masterpiece, and that the hundreds of positive four- and five-star reviews it would garner would send it to the top of the best-seller lists.
By the way, this old promotional video uses an old URL – this site is now the place to be!
Continue reading “Do reviews matter?”
John Linwood Grant and I have been friends on Facebook for some time now. We share a love of books, of the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras, and a sense of the surreal and absurd, and he has interviewed me on the subject of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and been kind enough to write things about another of my books. He, however, has lurchers and a beard, as the biography at the end of his latest book, The Assassin’s Coin, reveals – I have neither.
I was going to buy the ebook edition of this book, but since the only ebook edition appears to be in Kindle format, and I don’t own a Kindle, I went for the printed paperback, and I’m glad I did. It’s a nicely produced slim volume, with no glaring typos or other print-based infelicities, and it’s of a length to be read in one sitting. However, I took a couple of evenings to finish it – it was a book that made me put it down, think, and then take it up again.
Continue reading “The Assassin’s Coin – John Linwood Grant – Review”
In 2008, I was living in Japan, and making my living as a freelance writer. One of the assignments that came my way was the editing of an investment bank’s English-language marketing materials, prior to their translation into Japanese. However, something got in the way… Continue reading “Here we go again (and what the last time did for my writing?)…”
Anyone who knows anything about the booky side of me knows that I love fonts. I try not to be too gimmicky about them and I avoid a lot of the “script” and “brush” fonts, as I’m not really a graphic designer doing posters, but I do try to find a font for a book body that suits the content.
For example…