People often ask me, ‘hey Ali! Whaddya do when you’re not writing books, blogging about writing books or blogging about books written by other people?’
Continue reading “How To Sell An eBook”
My first contribution to The Working Barbarian is now live! You have just under a week to read it and vote on what happens next.
To explain – I recently became involved with an online Choose Your Own Adventure story. Every week someone writes a section, You The Public vote on what happens next, and the baton is passed on to the next writer who writes their bit of the tale based on the results.
Continue reading “Good News, Everyone”
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If you are a Facebook user (and I do appreciate it is not everyone’s cup of tea), this post may be of interest to you.
I recently found out via the always helpful Nicola Morgan’s author page that the site now requires page admins to pay them cash dollars to promote status updates to folk who already ‘Like’ something. Essentially, if I don’t give them my money (which I haven’t, because come on) 10% or fewer ‘likers’ will receive 12 Books page updates in their news feeds.
What this means is that you are missing out on some super hilarious memes I’ve been scheduling, like this: Continue reading “Public Service Announcement”
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Last winter the Scottish Book Trust delivered the very first Book Week Scotland, a scheme that got people to focus on books, reading and writing for a week. Naturally I am very much in favour of this sort of behaviour, and it turns out lots of other people were too because everyone had such a jolly time they have decided to do it all over again.
Continue reading “Book Week Scotland”
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The weekly photo challenge is ‘colour’, and as you can see I chose blue. Initially I was going to write lots of different pages of a story I am working on longhand in different colours and make a gallery of those – but I appear to have misplaced most of my more interesting pen colours. SEND PENS NOW. Or, look at the blue things instead whilst I think of further ridiculous ways to procrastinate.
Some of the bluest books I own.
Blue desk tidy, featuring a blue ruler and some blue pens. Also the weird wicker owl thingy and Totoro.
Reading chair, covered in mostly blue blanket I knitted. The owl is Professor Lindsay.
Blue shoes, containing my blue degree tube and a blue light sabre.
Story I am working on in blue.
Blue DVDs.
In other news, The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian is now live – why not go forth and vote on who you want the hero to be?
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I have a number of friends on the internet who I’ve come across through writing stories. One such person is Glempy, also called The Rogue Verbumancer, who you may remember from guest posts like this one, and my almost monthly entries for the Pictonaut Challenge.
As the general setup of Pictonaut implies, Glempy is one of those writers who likes to get other people writing. This predilection could stem from pure philanthropy, or it might be orchestrated so the man in question has a ready-made support network of peers gnashing their teeth and churning out #amwriting tweets at the same time as him – it’s impossible to know for sure. Still, whatever his reasons, the outcome is a positive one – lots of stories for you to read.
With that in mind, I would like to tell you about Sir’s latest project – The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian.
Do you remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? You read some of the story, then had the option to choose what happened next – for instance, ‘to go through the spooky arch turn to page 62,’ or ‘to climb the rickety ladder turn to page 4.’ The story was in your hands, and anything could happen – if you made a bad choice the hero might actually die, or at least be horribly maimed.*
The idea of Working Barbarian is to resurrect this storytelling model. Glempy has assembled a group of writers, including yours truly, who have agreed to relay The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian in gripping internet instalments. After each instalment there will be a list of ‘what do you want to do next’ options and you, the general public, get to Choose Your Own Adventure by voting on whether you want the Barbarian to go through the spooky arch, climb the rickety ladder or stroke the adorable cthulu kitten.
I’m really excited about this project, and if you’re excited too then you should CLICK HERE whereupon you can subscribe to email updates or follow the blog so that new posts appear in your reader. You’ll also be able to find out a bit more about the merry band of people involved in writing the thing.
The first part of the story, penned by Glempy himself, goes live on Monday April 8th. Hooray!
12 Books in 12 Months 
