Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day! For those who haven’t come across it before, this is more in celebration of old fashioned, Treasure Island, ‘Arrr, Jim Lad’ pirates rather than those new fangled modern day, wouldn’t be out of place in an Expendables movie ones.
(Technically they haven’t revealed themselves as pirates by the time they sing this song, but it still felt like a good way to start a Wednesday.)
Have you any idea how difficult it is to start working on your children’s book when you’ve just been reading The Kite Runner? It’s got to be at least 11 out of 10, if not harder.
Continue reading “She Is Too Fond Of Books”
Yesterday’s post has been rendered slightly redundant by the fact that the writing classes I was looking at are all full. That’s what happens when you haver… However, I’ll be more on the ball for the next round. Thanks to everyone who left me advice, you’re all stars!
In the meantime, can you access Glasgow with ease? Do you like listening to stories? Well then you should head along to The Old Hairdressers tomorrow (Thursday 13th) at 7pm to hear the recording of Outside Thoughts, a short story podcast. The very first story, Je Ne Regrette Rien, was written by me and is being performed by ‘a great young actress’ according to the people behind the project, which I’m sure you will agree is excitingly cryptic.
Unfortunately I have a prior engagement (seeing A Dream on a Midsummer’s Night as performed by the wondrous Wee Stories in Portobello) so I will have to listen online later, and of course I will stick up a link when it goes live – but if you want to soak up the ambience as it happens then you should very much do so. It’s only £2!
Find Outside Thoughts on Twitter @ShortFictionPod and on Facebook here.
Although I’ve written stories since I was a kid, I’ve never felt the need to take a course in writing.
I studied English until second year of university, and there were elements of creative writing throughout school, but the main focus was always on work by other people.
This was never really an issue for me because I’ve always maintained that you learn by doing, so I spend a lot of my time reading, writing and then reading and writing a bit more. Then watching fifteen episodes of 30 Rock back to back with a pot of tea.
Continue reading “Should I Take A Writing Class?”
I’ve had the same comment from three different ‘people’ today. It goes like this:
Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. [ Gosh, really? Boy is my face red… ] On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings, You now NEED On-Page SEO. [ I can’t begin to describe how little I care. 12 books in 12 months is a writing experiment, not a statistic. ] So what is good On-Page SEO?First your keyword must appear in the title.Then it must appear in the URL.You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article. [ buh? ] Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page. You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword. [ what, like this? ] There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword….wait there’s even more Now what if i told you there was a simple WordPress plugin that does all the On-Page SEO, and automatically for you? That’s right AUTOMATICALLY, just watch this 4minute video for more information.
I am not linking to the aforementioned video, of course. But thanks Kraig Vangorp, German Thurlow and Gabriele Vorhies for bringing my terrible SEO skills to my attention. Your names will probably come in handy as characters someday.
Happy first birthday to the Rogue Verbumancer’s Pictonaut Challenge! Over this year I haven’t always posted mine by the end of the month (or at all, last month), but it ain’t midnight till the fat lady sings so WHOOMP, here it is. (NB Since knocking this out on Write or Die about an hour ago, I have read that the picture was intended to inspire something beautiful and literary. Sorry, Glempy… My bad.)
Continue reading “A Man Drinks Tea – August’s Pictonaut Challenge”
12 Books in 12 Months 