New financial year

Yep, you can tell it’s a new financial year! For those creating invoices, profit & loss sheets are now in a new year. Yeah, I’m grousing!

Our weather has turned sharply cold again but the fire is nicely keeping us warm.

On the bright side, I have some new beta readers who are currently working on various books for me. I am very grateful to them!

Okay, updates.

Clans in conflict

Deadly Convergence is still available here.

Still editing the other Kindle Unlimited book.

The Dark Road is still with the beta reader, although I may have another option there.

Dark Beginnings – I am still working on this but it is a little on the backburner at the moment.

Bushland Castle Productions

The novella series of Otherworldly Emergence closes in July.

All of the information necessary is at the website:

https://www.bushlandcastleproductions.com/emergence

Join me in being part of this amazing opportunity.

Consequences

Heart of Deception is currently with the cover artist prior to being published. Can’t wait for that to come through.

Legacy of Risks is now with a few beta readers, so when I get that back I’ll update that with any changes necessary.

Paranormal

I have gotten back into my ghost hunter/daemon hunter story. I have yet a few things to work out, but I am writing in it.

For those curious about the spelling of daemons, yes, they are demons, but not of this world. They come from Nina’s world, therefore they are “different”.

Shifters

These are currently on the backburner while Aleksander and Blair work out where their story is going.

Malevictus

Let’s not talk about editing. I am struggling to edit this one. I need to edit it, I know that, but it’s just not there for me. It’s a matter of digging in and getting it done. (sigh) This hasn’t changed.

On other news about that, the second book is coming along.

Rules of writing

I often see things that purport to the “10 Rules of Writing” or “Follow these 10 rules and your book will sell”. These are often not rules.

In the words of either Stephen King or G R R Martin, there are no “rules” to writing.

Some of what we think or believe to be rules are conventions, not actual rules.

I have chosen to follow the Australian Government Style Manual and the Macquarie Dictionary for grammar, punctuation and spelling rules. Those are what I follow.

Everything else, to me, is a convention – like too many words that end in “ly”. It’s a convention. Not ending a sentence in “with” or something like that – it’s a convention.

Not starting a sentence with “and” or “but” – it’s a convention.

And, interestingly, most of these conventions were brought about in 1700s. Or thereabouts.

What I think, then, is that the English language is an evolving language. Take the word “Google”. It used to just be a brand name for the search engine on the Internet. It’s now a word in the dictionary.

“Google” is a prime example of the English language evolving as time moves on – like it has done all its life. So many words come from different languages. English comprises of a lot of old English words, but there are an awful lot of Latin, French, German, Greek and a whole heap more.

But going back to the rules.

One thing that I have taken on as a rule is this – my first draft (the raw writing I first put down) was told to me by my characters. It’s my job to write that story down as they tell it to me.

Then every draft after that is me refining that story so that others can understand it when they read it. So that others will be engrossed and drawn in by the characters, the setting and the plot.

That’s my job. Whether I do it well is a different matter.

But that is something I’m learning every day. I do trip up sometimes and that’s when I learn even more about writing.

Writing doesn’t come to us without a lot of hard work. We work at our career – and to me, writing is a career – and we work hard to improve throughout our writing career.

Never forget – we’re not too old to learn something new.

Talk to you all next fortnight!