Tag: Online Communities

A short WIPpet for Wednesday

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 23 Comments

Hi all.  My contribution to this week’s WIPpet Wednesday is going to be short as I’m currently in the middle of preparing for an interview for a work placement tomorrow.

So I’m back to my old mean self and I’m only sharing with you 2 sentences from chapter 2 of my current WIP Reunion of the Heart. We’re going back and forth in the novel; here Anna has just arrived at her old school for the reunion:

Anna stumbled a little as she walked; she didn’t wear heels very often.  As they approached the school buildings, memories of being a pupil here flooded back to her.

So that’s it for me for this week.  Hopefully I’ll be able to share something longer next week.  And if you would like to take part in WIPpet Wednesday, just post on your blog a piece of your writing relating in some way to the date.  Then add your details here.

Thank you K. L. Schwengel for hosting. 🙂

Well I’ve finished my book… kind of

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 10 Comments

This week I hit a new milestone on my journey as an author.  I finished the first draft of my second novel which I’m calling ‘Reunion of the Heart’.

It’s been a lot of fun to plot and then write and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the world. 🙂  But as the title of this post suggests, it’s not finished yet.  Those of you who are writers will recognise that I  need to edit, edit, edit before I release it.  And of course I need to have other, dispassionate eyes on it so that I can make it the best that it can be.

So at some point I’ll be putting out a request for beta readers, but NOT YET!  There’s lots that I need to work on by myself first.  I may well tweak scenes and/or insert scenes.  I realise that as a story it does need a lot of tightening up.  I feel like there’re potentially a lot of holes in the plot, things I haven’t caught yet in my writing process.

Yes, I know that’s where beta readers come in, but I want to finish reading it all through first as my initial edit.  I want to make sure I’ve ironed out any obvious mistakes before I (fearfully) hand it over to be read by other people for the first time.  That’s a scary process, for sure – handing over your precious WIP to be scrutinised by other eyes for the first time.

If you’re a writer, I’m sure you’re familiar with that feeling.  You desperately want your WIP to be read by other people… and yet at the same time you’re scared ****less at the thought of other people who aren’t you reading and potentially being critical of your work.

But it needs to be done and so I’m working towards that point when I can finally hand it over to some generous people to read and make comments on.  I want to be the best writer that it’s possible for me to be.  I feel I’m improving and growing in confidence as a writer all the time.  As I’ve said before, the online community of writers has transformed the way I write and my confidence in myself.

So thank you once more.  And I’ll keep you all posted as to my novel’s progress.

By the way… are any of you working on editing?  How are you finding it?  I’d love to have your comments. 🙂

100 followers of this blog!!!

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 10 Comments

100 blog followers

Just a quick post to say: Yay I’ve reached 100 followers of my blog!!  It’s such a great feeling knowing that there are 100 different people out there wanting to read what I’ve put on this blog, offering me their comments and often advice in my sometimes turbulent life as an indie author.

Thank you to all of you who are following my blog, you don’t know how much it means to me to know that I have your interest in me, my blog and my writing. Having published my debut novel in August last year, it’s been amazing to have the support of my fellow bloggers, many if not most of whom are writers themselves and also on this journey.

And I mustn’t forget to say that I wouldn’t have a blog at all if my husband hadn’t suggested it, so BIG thanks to him too!!

I’m looking forward to an exciting 2014, when I’ll hopefully be publishing my next novel.  So thank you once again and watch this space!

Writing every day in January

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 11 Comments

I’m not sure I’ll be able to stick to this, but my aim is to write every single day this month, even if it’s only for 20 minutes or less. I’ve been inspired by this article that suggests making a realistic New Year’s resolution regarding writing – to write for 20 minutes a day every day in January or less if you can’t manage it.

I think it’s such a fantastic idea and I’ll explain why. In recent years I’ve been writing more and more, particularly in the past year or so since I’ve joined Twitter, started a WordPress blog and have been in contact with, and even met some, other writers.

But I still struggle to write every day. I’m not an especially busy person, so in many ways I have it really good and there’s not much excuse not to write. I find that life takes over, working, walking the dog and looking after him, housework etc. And as I was saying to my husband today, as much as I enjoy writing it’s work – it is hard work and it’s not always easy as I’ve been finding lately as I work on my current WIP. I don’t know if you guys ever feel like that about it, but that’s how it is for me.

Having said that, I love it and I have more and more incentives to keep writing, not least all my online writer friends. You keep me going and I really appreciate it! And as I said that’s inspired me to write more.

So far in these first few days of January I’ve managed to write every day, although not for that long each time. But I should add that in recent months on a number of occasions I’ve managed over 1000 words in one day, which is good for me, so it’s not like I’m constantly slacking!

What are your thoughts on writing every day? Do you struggle to do it or is it something that comes naturally? I’d love to hear from you. 🙂

To Scrivener or not to Scrivener??

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 18 Comments

Scrivener

I wanted to comment on my experiments with Scrivener and what I’m making of it.

Back in September I downloaded a free trial of Scrivener to see what I thought of it. Since then I’ve been a bit of a chicken and I’ve barely looked at it. Although I had made some headway with the tutorial, I was finding it very complex and a lot to take in.

My husband suggested I just forget the tutorial and simply play around with it to get a feel for what it’s like. I couldn’t even work out how to get past the tutorial; he had to show me lol. Anyway today I was having a proper go for the first time.

And I have to say I’m unsure about it. My husband’s offered to buy it for me for Christmas if I’d like it. But like I say I’m in two minds about it. Yes it’s very clever and allows you to do all sorts of things to assist your writing, such as making it easier to plan by having easy access to all your ideas and thoughts on different aspects of your story.

It also enables you to navigate much more easily between the different parts of your work, so that if you need to go back and amend things or refer to passages you’ve already written in a chapter way back, it doesn’t take forever. That’s the idea anyway.

But I didn’t get that far today. I barely did anything – at least it felt that way even though I spent quite a long time playing around with it. I’m definitely going to keep plugging away at it to see if I could get used to it. The thing is though I found myself getting rid of things I didn’t mean to get rid of and then not being able to access them again.

Scrivener just seems so vast in terms of what it allows you as the author to do. And so complicated! People have said to me that Word is easy by comparison and that’s so true. It’s like I really REALLY want to love Scrivener. I can see the potentially enormous benefits of it to my writing.

But if I can’t get to grips with it, even the basic stuff then there’s going to be a problem. My friend and fellow author Jade Reyner uses it and has written about her problems with it here and here. She’s getting on all right with it now I think.

I just hope that if I give it a bit longer before my free trial runs out, that I can maybe make some headway with it and perhaps just perhaps get used enough to using it that I can say ‘yep, Scrivener’s definitely for me’.

Or maybe it’s a case of square peg, round hole…

What are your thoughts on Scrivener? Have you/do you use it and if so what do you make of it?

The Inheritance is FREE from today for 5 days!!

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 6 Comments

TheInheritance

Well it’s here. As of today my debut novel The Inheritance is free on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk for 5 days until Monday.

If you haven’t yet read it, why not download it now while it’s free? And let me know what you think of it. Feedback whether positive or negative is always good!

Check out my Goodreads page too where you can read a short bio of me and connect with other readers/writers. I can also be contacted on Twitter via @ElaineJeremiah.

I hope you all have a good day and for those of you who are preparing to take part in NaNoWriMo – good luck!

What a week that was!

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 12 Comments

Week

Well my blog tour to promote my debut novel The Inheritance is over. I’ve learned a lot from it, the main thing being to keep persevering in promoting my novel.

I’ve had some great advice recently on how to do just that. I feel that my blog isn’t being seen by that many people, and therefore my book is not as well known as it could be. Yes it’s true that blogging is not the only way to promote a novel – far from it.

But I realise that if I’m to gain support from other writers, which I believe is one of the key ways of promoting my book, I need to have a greater presence on Twitter for one thing. I have to confess to being a little lazy when it comes to Twitter. I’m often following new people, following them after they follow me or finding their details then choosing to follow them.

However I don’t engage that much with other Twitter users. Recently I’ve taken to retweeting people, but that only goes so far. I do thank fellow Twitter users for following me which seems to go down well. But I feel I need to devote a bit more time to Twitter, to cultivate my ‘relationships’ with my followers and those I’m following.

Of course if you’re tweeting regularly you have a little less time for blogging and writing. I guess it’s all about prioritising – being able to balance everything so that you spend the right about of time on each thing. Obviously the writing should come first – after all that’s what we’re here for isn’t it?

I do think, though, that our relationships with other writers are so important. They can offer us invaluable support and advice because they’ve gone through, and are going through, exactly the same process as us in their quest to write books and market them.

So having blogged pretty much every day for the last week, I think I’m going to blog a little less this week, tweet a little more and DEFINITELY write much more.

How do you cope with juggling all the different aspects to your writing life?