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12 Books in 12 Months

writing books and blogging about it

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Good Search Terms

If you follow me on twitter (@12books12months) you’ll be aware that I am a sporadic stat obsessive.  Which basically means I while away certain evenings by checking how many hits the blog had that day, then putting out plaintive messages on social networking sites to increase the numbers.  Obviously it would be more constructive to spend this time writing, but whatever, you’re not the boss of me.

This lurking around the WordPress Dashboard offers mixed results, but I think the main thing we can take away from it is that it makes me kind of annoying to be around.  I know the best way to get hits is to have interesting stuff to post, not to whinge at folk on Facebook – but that doesn’t stop me.  It doesn’t even slow me down.  I merely hark back to the glory days of the book festival when I was all kinds of popular without having to do very much, because people wanted to read about what was going on and I happened to be writing about it.

However, the book festival comes but once a year, and to conduct a countdown from this point on until next August would be overkill.  So what to write about?  Well, stats can help with that, because they show the most popular search terms that have brought people to the blog.  Once you know what piqued internet interest in you, it’s merely a case of emulating that success.

Except it isn’t really, because people get to this blog by searching for three things.  They either look for “12 books in 12 months” or some variation thereon; “Amanda Palmer”; or some one-off random search term that means nothing to anyone other than the searcher.  Having said that, I do like reading those bad boys.

Here are some of my favourites.

Continue reading “Good Search Terms” →

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Trenton Lee Stewart Interview

© Shannon Sturgis (http://shannonsturgisphotography.typepad.com/)

Trenton Lee Stewart is the American author of The Mysterious Benedict Society, which is the sort of book a library assistant might recommend to young persons who like warm humour, adventures, puzzles and fun. I asked him if he would do an interview with me by email, and he said yes.  So here it is.

Can you sum up The Mysterious Benedict Society books for people who haven’t read them?

After passing a series of mysterious tests, a diversely talented group of four children are recruited by a benevolent genius named Mr. Benedict to go on an important mission. The first book is about that mission and the children’s developing relationships; the second and third are continuations of the Society’s adventures.

I read in one interview with you that the editing process for The Mysterious Benedict Society was quite arduous – was it the same for the other books in the series or did it get easier?

Continue reading “Trenton Lee Stewart Interview” →

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Ode to Coffee

I have written about the relative merits of tea and coffee before, as part of the readers Q&A series.  Back in May I informed The Rogue Verbumancer that I saw tea as my staple writing drink, although I tend to kick-start the day with coffee.

It was a pretty riveting post.

Anyhoo, whilst this remains true, I tend to regard coffee as my rent-paying-job drink (journalism/writing is not my main income yet, but I’m working on it).  This is because when I am conducting assorted administrative tasks in an office environment, I need to sporadically re-kick-start myself several times a day as opposed to the once or twice required when penning glorious fictions.  I find the immediate caffeine boost of coffee sharpens my focus on envelope stuffing and email-replying better than tea – maybe because over the years I’ve imbibed tea more often and have immunised myself against its effects. 

Continue reading “Ode to Coffee” →

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Touch Typing

The other morning I forgot how to touch type. I don’t know if it was down to tiredness, or lack of concentration, or perhaps a touch of mild bubonic plague; but whatever it was I was coming out with endless streams of jumbled consonants.  In the end I had to start watching what my fingers were doing on the keyboard in order to get coherent sentences out of them.  Best administrative assistant / writer evar.

Any person who has tried to write 2000 words of fiction every day over a sustained period of time will already know that touch typing is A Good Thing.  It means you can get lost in the words, letting them fall out of your brain and onto the screen in record time without breaking your concentration to remind your left index finger where the ‘f’ key is (which defies logic as it is – the ‘f’ key doesn’t have that bump on it for decoration, brain, it’s there so you can find it without looking).

Probably the worst thing you can possibly do in a ‘forgetting how to type’ situation is ironically most people’s default position, namely to overthink it.  If you go ‘oh, I’ve made more mistakes than usual, what’s going on there?’ you start to come up with outlandish ways to explain your ineptitude, which then gets progressively worse because you’ve been dwelling on it rather than getting on with what you’re meant to be doing.

I suspect if you didn’t pay any attention at all you’d probably work it out of your system naturally, and as long as you proof read your correspondence with due diligence no one need ever be any the wiser.  Although I don’t know that for sure, because I fall into the ‘noticing and wondering what’s the matter with me’ camp rather than the blitz era carrying on regardless group.

And this, dear reader, is what is known as a First World Problem – I gather there are some people out there who don’t even have any hands. Touch typing is but a distant dream for those brave souls and yet they struggle on.  Presumably they dictate their novels to a secretary, or upload them directly to Audioboo.

Verily, this is food for thought.

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Writing Competition

The Guardian books blog has brought some pretty good things to my attention of late, not least the Mills and Boon New Voices competition.   The winner could well go on to literary stardom, or at least romance publication; and everyone who enters is given feedback on their first chapter – as Alison Flood discovered.

My first thought on reading this was to submit the first chapter of last year’s NaNoWriMo effort, which started life as an affectionate M&B parody.  But it was a short-lived thought, which lasted approximately up until the point where I re-read the thing.  The Single Mum’s Aristocratic Library Assistant has many fine qualities, but it is not stylistically appropriate for this contest.  I have copied and pasted below with a couple of minor edits so you can see what I mean…

Continue reading “Writing Competition” →

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The Great Kindle Challenge: Day 12

For those who are new to The Great Kindle Challenge, I thought I would give a quick overview of how it all began before drawing my inevitable conclusions.  Most of this is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, as you can probably tell.

Background

Once Upon A Time there was an eccentric gent who went by the name of Professor Amazon.  Like all unusual academics, he was the owner of an enormous raggle taggle white beard, and his moustache was a champion of the genre.  He wore spectacles, because genius tends to make one’s eyes a little weak, and was generally to be seen sporting the very latest in holey old jeans and slightly less holey jumpers.

Professor Amazon was the older brother of a younger sister, whose was called Praline Amazon because their parents were having an off day when they named her.  Praline had spent most of her life working very hard to show the world that she was more than just a silly name, and she founded an internet business that you may have heard of – it was called Amazon.

One day, Praline called her brother on the telephone and said to him, “Professor Amazon, I want you to invent me a thing.” Continue reading “The Great Kindle Challenge: Day 12” →

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