It’s time for Thomas Bladen to go through the looking glass. A well-known author (Richard Bach, I’m fairly confident) once referred to his books as his literary children. When it comes to my Thomas Bladen Spy Chaser novels, I have tried to do something subtle different with each one. Consequently, I love all my literary children …
Tag: Amazon
What can you say apart from please buy my book? Pt 2
Sometimes you need to branch out. For a novelist, being published presents a whole new set of challenges. You suddenly have to do other sorts of writing, including writing about writing. There are online blurbs, interviews (I’ll mention in passing that I’m still available…), and the subtle – or not so subtle – art of promoting your novel. …
Standpoint – Glossary of British Slang Terms
It’s always struck me as slightly strange that we refer to this language as English when it’s really an amalgamation of many languages that have changed and enriched it over the centuries. Back in the day (the late 80s, in case you were wondering) I spent a year in the US and soon realised that their …
July 4th
Every item tells a story. That’s right folks, it’s an on-the-hoofer…Well, of course I wasn’t going to let US Independence Day pass without a blog post. After all, as someone once said, parodying a comment allegedly made about Billy Connolly and the shipyards, I spent one year living there and 25 years talking about it. (To …
A critical mass
The purps of being a wallflower. In the last seven days I’ve had three really useful pieces of feedback. Okay, you could call them criticisms – as if that were necessarily a bad thing – but that wouldn’t do them justice or reveal their true value.Allow me to elaborate…I talked before about how writers largely exist …
Dark Dates
They say you never really know someone until you live with them and I’ve found that applies to writers as well. By which, I mean, it’s only when you spend quality time with them that you begin to understand what makes them tick and what life experiences they’re drawing upon. Sharing a blog like Strictly …
A little bit of magic!
If you’ve ever walked up a steep hill, or climbed a mountain, or run a marathon, or triumphed over seemingly impossible odds, you’ll know about the moment. It’s hard to define, but it’s a silent sense of wonder and awe and relief and inner joy all rolled into one. My mountain, which became a steep …
Bonjour la classe
Once upon a time, not so long ago* – all right then, it was only back in August, Susan Louineau sat in the virtual chair and told me about her ebook, The Chapel in the Woods, which she self-published this year. Unlike me, Susan has a track record in marketing and put all that knowledge …
Here’s Looking At You
I trust I’m not alone in that when I check out the reader reviews on sites like Amazon, I always look at the lowest scores first. It’s not literary schadenfreude that drives me, it’s the same approach I take with my own work. Some would say that makes me a glass empty kinda guy. More …
A trouble shared?
I knew a woman on Staten Island who had a knack for finding coins. She, being a devout Catholic, thought it was some kind of telepathy / magnetism thing rather than any mystical ability (and no, she didn’t have a metal detector walking-stick). By all accounts, she racked up a tidy sum over the years …