Category Archives: General

World Book Day…Inspiration for YOU

Leave a reply

So, it’s here again – Happy World Book Day to you 🙂

I can’t tell whether this is growing in popularity each year, or just that I am coming across more people who are getting involved with it: teaching friends sorting out their costumes to wear for school (hello Katniss and Frodo – you look great today!) What a great day for writers, readers and anyone really – seeing the enjoyment, inspiration and interest people get from books on a day like today can help you see, that in a world of social media, reality TV, internet and HD gaming – books still hold their own.

If you ask me about my favourite books from childhood, I can reel them off. Ask me my favourite computer game? I’d struggle to decide – and that’s not because I didn’t waste huge amounts of time playing games or watching TV… It’s just that none of those things moved me or had the influence over me that books did. Even with children today, with all the choices they have, books still come right at the top of the list, even though they might not realise it. Start quoting funny riddling rhymes from Doctor Seuss and alot of them will join right in – would the same happen if you quoted a character from a kids game like Skylanders? Probably not.

Anyway, I’m not dressing up today (unfortunately) – but instead, I’ve collected together some of the coolest things I’ve seen today to celebrate World Book Day. Check them out and hopefully they’ll bring you some inspiration or entertainment 🙂

Beautiful Book CoverYou know how I love Pinterest – take a look at this fantastic  pinboard of beautiful book covers by Jennifer Cownie. She covers a huge range of styles and techniques – inspiration for your next book cover? Hopefully!

World Book Day Logo

World Book Day has a huge official site, filled with ideas to help you celebrate today, as well as details of events taking place and inspiration for writers – mainly young – but you never know, you may just learn something simple that sticks with you! (I learned something new about grammar from Alphablocks a few months ago and it was just the way they did it that made more sense than my A-levels in English – who knew?)

Hairy

Want to see kids enjoying books? Then check out some of these fabulous costumes, courtesy of The Guardian newspaper. My personal favourites? Stickman – I LOVE Julia Donaldson books, and this costume is brilliant; and Hairy Maclary the dog (pictured).

http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/gallery/2015/mar/06/world-book-day-costumes-cats-rats-hats-your-pictures

Writers Words of Wisdom

1 Reply

I came across this post this week, showcasing famous quotes from writers who died in 2014, and thought it was worth sharing. Some amazing authors passed away last year – Maya Angelou remains a favourite of mine after I was introduced to her writing during high school English – and this article features some of their most memorable and inspiring words. Click the link below to see the feature.Maya Angelou quote

http://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/i-began-to-exist#.wgMKmDZWxa

VERY INTERESTING MAPS WHICH HELP YOU TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD

2 Replies

Just some random surfing on a Sunday afternoon and I come across this on the lovely Reading Ape’s site… Who knew you had almost as many countries with a McDonalds, as there are locations around the world that you can become fast food yourself, for a great white shark? I do like quirky factoids like these.

And this is why I write…

2 Replies

Everyone has their creative or artistic niche don’t they – the writer, the painter, the illustrator – and there are some lucky people who get morethan one of these skills. I am not one of those people – writing and a bit of dabbling (electronically) with book covers is my limit. If you are in any doubt to the truth of this, I present as Exhibit A my attempt at decorated gingerbread men (well, man and lady – you’ve got to have balance):

There’s just something weird that happens between the picture in my brain that I want things to look like, and what my hands actually manage to do. (The same goes for drawing, painting and pretty much any other artistic pursuit). A quick click-click on google and I discover some infinitely superior dressed gingerbread people to reinforce my theory…

image

But you know what, they still tasted good when I munched on their brains Walking Dead-style 🙂

Well, that’s how I’ve spent the last couple of hours, how’s your Saturday shaping up?image

2014 My blog, in review

2 Replies

You’ll have seen lots of these little reports popping up around blogs over the last week or so I’m sure – we’re all getting the same message “The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog…” that intrigues us and makes us look back at what 2014 was like on your blog.

I’ve enjoyed reading these for the blogs I follow and seeing how they’ve posted, and sometimes, changed during the year – blog evolution, I suppose.

When I’ve looked back at mine, I had a more ‘eclectic’ year than before: I tended to post as and when I felt like it and not taken part in as many of the blog events as I have in previous years. It was a busy year, with less writing than normal, with the exception of NaNoWriMo month in November, but I think I actually blogged a little more than before. Talking about writing, rather than actually doing it – effective, eh? 🙂

Anyway, I’m not the type to do resolutions, why wait for January to make a change? But there are a couple of things I like the idea of doing in 2015 – so watch this space to see if I manage to do them!

Happy new year! Here’s to a blogging good 2015 x

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 20 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Nerd Gift of Christmas

9 Replies

I hope you’ve all had a lovely time opening gifts over Christmas, if you’ve been a good girl or boy 🙂 For any other Harry Potter fans out there – I think there may be a couple – I had to share with you this fantastic stocking filler that came courtesy of my muggle sister (not Dumbledore unfortunately).

image

 

For little old me, who is always complaining about not having enough time to get things done, I’m hoping that this might be able to help me get more hours out of the day! It’s hung above my writing desk in my little bookish corner – all I need to do now is work out how the heck it works – the instructions from J K Rowling don’t seem to be working 🙂

Did you get anything super nerd-worthy or bookish in your stocking?

Still hanging in there…

4 Replies

Still a way to go How’s this for an uplifting, end-of-week-3 image?

It is about that time in the challenge that it’s worth looking back a little – not editing obviously – but to look at what’s happened between word 1 and word…. 36,482 …today!

With a little over a week to go now, I’m getting there with the words – just 13.5k left, so less than 2,000 a day now, to get me to the end

The Halfway Point

2 Replies

don't look back This is good advice at this point in time. I’m still fighting the urge to mess around with the structure of the novel and questioning if some of the things really need to be in there – most of the time I’m winning, but I definitely feel the temptation once I’ve got a lot of a book written to keep going back over things.

So, halfway through the month, with fifteen days of writing under my belt, I feel OK. But, there’s two weeks left to go and these are usually the tougher ones for me…just typing in itself can get quite grating over the course of the month with NaNo – especially if you use a computer for much of your ‘day job’ outside the hours that NaNo takes over. I’m hoping that my interest in the story will keep me going, and the fact that doing this is getting me closer to completion in a couple of weeks, than I’ve gotten all year.

(By the way – word count this morning was 32,899 and I’m going to get some more done tonight – hopefully!)

Day 11 – No editing!

1 Reply

first draftAnyone else struggle with the urge to go back and start editing / checking something you’ve recently written? When I open the document to begin writing again, I find that I have a tendancy to go back a few pages or so, re-reading to get myself into the flow…but then I find that I begin tweaking and changing and twiddling things whilst I’m there!

If you read any of the advice on the NaNo website, they advocate writing, writing and more writing -Editing is the enemy! 🙂 And I know that’s true, because my writing certainly flows differently if I’m not at all in the editing mode.

So, that is why today’s inspirational kick in the booty is this: “First drafts don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be written.” Now, all I have to do is actually listen the advice I’m giving myself.