Navigational tips for writing and publishing

How do you learn about writing and publishing? The  most effective way is by doing it. It’s a great way to tell your story.

I started working on a book with Charles Bentley PhD in about 2000. I can’t exactly recall when we started but our experiment was short lived. But then a decade later we resumed work. It was never easy, and it still isn’t as we move into the distribution phase. But we did it. We got through and now there is a book that is already loved by many readers. It was also a pleasure to work again with Roger Beale who drew cartoons and little figures for the book. They remind us not to takes ourselves so seriously for a change.

Navigational Tips For Living In An Imperfect World is a GPS for humans in a book. It’s a road map that’s easy to read
and fun. It will help you navigate your authentic pathway in an imperfect world. Even though you’ll be able to read it quickly, it’s a book you will return to. It’s available on Amazon as an e-book and on Lulu in print. There will be more distribution points soon.
It’s very easy as a writer to leave lots of projects sitting in your files or on your desk other seemingly more pressing work. There comes a time when the work has to be taken off the desk and sent out there. It feels better in every way when you see the published book! To find out more check out http://navigationaltipsforliving.com/

Building yourself a platform? Eddie Blatt has

A website or a blog is a platform. A Twitter account is a platform too. It’s a place to stand up and say, well I am here, I am listening and I have things to say.  It does take a bit of work to set up and maintain. We all have to choose what to say and what kind of an audience we’re going to take our work or product to. I think it’s a good idea to be building your platform as you are building your product. Do I do this? No. Not enough. If only. It’s always a battle between doing the work and doing the website or blog about the work. Eddie Blatt is a writer who has attended a workshop  I ran and with whom I’ve worked on his synopsis. It’s handy to have a synopsis just in case you meet a publisher at a party or in the dentist’s waiting room. You never know. Eddie has not only been working on a synopsis but building a platform so that readers and publishers alike have the chance to find out more about him and his work.Please check it out at Confessions Of A Post-Spiritual Maverick for yourselves.  The address is http://www.confessionsofapostspiritualmaverick.com/

What do you  think? Do you have a platform? Or do you plan to?

‘There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it’

At every step of life and business we reassess what we value.

If you have a business, you are constantly making choices about value.  How much do you value your time, skills and experiences? You are also deciding how you value services. And on the other side of the coin (because money is a big factor in this) what can we offer that gives value to our clientele?

“There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.” So said Henry David Thoreau.

I place value on writing,  and I know how it feels when writing matters to you.

Stop Press! The end of daily print

When I was a teenager I would run across the lawn damp with dew to collect the newspaper of the front lawn. I wanted to read the tennis and school notes. I read all of the paper. And it sparked my interest in becoming a journalist.

I did work experience at the local paper, the Daily News, and wrote a lot of letters to newspapers along the eastern seaboard of Australia and inland. About 78 letters, as I recall. I worked my way through the phone books. In May 1979, I was taken on as a cadet by the Coffs Harbour Advocate as it was then called. On my second day a senior reporter took me along to interview Tammy Fraser, whose husband Malcolm was then the prime minister of Australia.

In a four year cadetship I covered almost everything, although, perhaps luckily,  I did not cover too many council meetings. That was left to my more worldly colleagues. I remember interviewing a man who worked on the museum train. He told me, and there was something about the way he said it that made me remember, that one day a tsunami would come. I hadn’t known what a tsunami was until that day. I learned so much about so many things. There were some terrible tragedies. Some wild and wacky people. I think it’s time I wrote about that kind of thing again. Occasionally too, rightly or wrongly I omitted covering stories. Sometimes it doesn’t serve anyone to drag someone onto the front page for a misdemeanour. Well, granted it might prevent someone else from a misdeed but anyway…

I remember taking the banana prices of a telex machine and running those, and putting in a story about the death of Andropov in Russia.

The two local papers mentioned above ceased daily print publication last week. It saddened me. I like to pick up the local paper when in a cafe, or buy it when something big has happened locally, or when there’s a picture of my daughter in it. And I know her grandmother and uncles liked to keep copies of that.

Yet I am definitively one of the iPad and digital generation who consumes news online.

I have an article about all of this published in today’s print and digital versions of The Australian. It’s accessible only to subscribers. That’s another new thing too.

KARMA EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY

This headline is from a sign on a telegraph pole near where I live. It’s a white sign made of those little metal characters people stick on doors and letterboxes. They were not stuck on evenly and the sign had buckled. I’ve always wondered who would have brought along a ladder to fix this sign to a power pole. And why? Who were they sending a message to?

I like the way it’s set out especially the ‘has his’.

KARMA

EVERY 

DOG 

HAS HIS 

DAY

I have just discovered the sign has gone. The screws in the pole are visible but the sign is gone. I imagine someone wanted it.  I always intended to take a photo of it. And luckily I pulled up very swiftly recently and did so. I think I knew KARMA EVERY SIGN HAS ITS DAY.

Why was this sign put up years ago then taken down now?

There are things you just need to write, and things are not right until you start writing……

Something big happened a few years ago, something so big, so confronting, and very scary, yet wondrous too. I contemplated death, and life. I needed to write about it. Being a journalist then I wanted to write about it in a journalistic way so I contacted the newspapers. My story, remarkable to me, was competing with all sorts of other remarkable stories. I had been sure it would sell
but it did not. It came close but I had replies saying we covered that last week. or if you could broaden it out to cover this, this and this….
Then, I started receiving letters and emails from friends writing, “Saw this, thought you’d be interested…” with a clipping of an article about a TV celebrity who had been going through a similar experience. But his experience is not half as dramatic as mine. Mine is more interesting, a bigger thing to face.
It was so frustrating. I wanted to tell this story. Where do I start writing? How do I start writing?
Around this time I’d started a blog. So I wrote the story a bit at a time – very simply, not worrying about making every word perfect, saying what was happening on the day of writing, and then going back to my story, my simple memoir. I was both shy about it yet wanting there to be someone out there reading it.
After a while I started to receive comments, and emails from people who said they were moved, and enthralled, and had read every word, and thanking me for sharing the story.
Most of all I felt better for having written.

Personal training regime for your writing

Q. How do we make our writing taut, trim and terrific?
A We need to be careful about what we put into it, and we need to practice every day. Make it a good habit.

Avoid the temptation to include cliches. And skip tautology – saying the same thing in different ways, repeating yourself using alternative phrases – you get the picture, see where I’m heading with this, vous comprenez, er …understand me? Keep it taut and remove the ‘-ology’.

Many of us say something in three different ways when we could use one. This is a mistake I make because I love words and want to use them wherever possible. Yet I know that repetition does me no favours. Any reader with a working mind can understand me the first time around, if I make myself clear.

Describing something in three different ways make my thoughts more difficult to follow and distracts the reader.
Two or three sentences complete with subordinate clauses (my usual mistake) is a form of meandering. Not that meandering is wrong but you should be aware of when you are deviating and decide if it works.

One beautiful, crisp sentence will drive a point home.

An open letter to the principal about Facebook

Chris Duncan, Principal of Lindisfarne Anglican Grammar School, in NSW, raised a storm in the media this week with his school newsletter where he replaced his usual column with two sentences. “Get your kids off Facebook. This verbal sewer is harming your children.”

This is my letter to him. I have a child at the school.
Thank you for raising the issue of Facebook use. It needs to be discussed.
Go to any football match (any code) and you’ll find sections of the stadium that are verbal sewers. We can’t stop that but we can choose if we go to the game, where we’ll sit, and how to behave. Likewise, only some sections of the online world and Facebook look and smell like a sewer. But much of it does not.
As in the rest of life the individual must decide on their level of engagement and how they’ll conduct themselves. Participation in social media is no different. Any parent’s role is in helping their child to know they have the personal power to choose what they read, watch and share, and with whom they interact. They should be encouraged to work out and implement their own code of social networking etiquette. And they need to develop their own system of checks and balances to determine whom they believe to be authentic, what is fun, and what oversteps the line.
Bullying is a serious concern, be it in the backyard, schoolyard, or online. When it’s our child who is bullied, or when someone behaves in an anti-social way towards them, a responsible parent tries to help. We comfort them, and remind them they are loved. Then we give them strategies to deal with the immediate crisis, and to help them identify and be prepared for when distressing situations arise in the future.
Early this month Northern Rivers Business Enterprise Centre ran a NSW-government sponsored seminar called Social Media For Business. Every one of the 70 available places at Tweed South Sports Club was taken. I attended. It provided a useful opportunity to explore what place social media has in our business marketing, and in our interaction with clients and the wider community. We learned how to establish a business web presence relatively easily, and cheaply, and how to set up a seamless and simple interface between that and the various social media platforms. What we did not have time to delve into was how to write and interact, and the etiquette of online and social media. As someone who has written, taught and helped business people with written content offline and online, I’ve noticed that many people don’t know how to convey their message clearly, or how to interact with ease. In many cases they’ve never been shown how.
Social media is a reality of business and public life, and of everyday social interaction, and everyone at the seminar was there to learn more. It may not be mine, or everyone’s favourite way of spending their time, or conversing with clients, and it’s not the be-all of marketing but social media is too big to be sidelined, or ignored.
There has been a lot of debate about how active schools should be in teaching netiquette, and in engaging with social media as part of the curriculum. Personally, I think it is best to be at the front of the wave, because social media is not going away, and it’s evolving all the time.
My suggestion is that Lindisfarne Anglican Grammar School, and indeed many schools, should actively seek educators and speakers on the topic of social media, to visit and talk to, and run programmes for teachers, students and parents about how to safely use and interact on social media. Recently Lindisfarne played host to an excellent speaker who gave a wonderful talk about how to relate to teenage boys. A session about social media would help not only to know the risks and how to handle them, but also how to integrate, and keep in proportion the place of social media in everyday life.
This would offer a positive alternative to creating an atmosphere of fear around Facebook and other social media. These things should be treated just like anything taught or used at school. For example, Twitter and Facebook are now vital means of communications in emergencies, and in the distribution of news.
With creative programs, well-thought out campaigns, and the development of online communities that are welcoming, relevant and accessible to students, their parents and teachers alike, students can learn how to handle themselves on social media platforms and use them to the good.
Kind regards,
Marian Edmunds
Parent & writer.

Why I attend writing workshops and now also run workshops

I attended a workshop about thriller writing on the weekend. I was at Brisbane Writers Festival on the weekend enjoying sessions, enjoying meeting,catching up with friends such as Irfan and chatting to the wonderful Linda Jaivin whose historical fiction workshop I attended a couple of years ago at Byron Bay. I spotted James Phelan’s thriller workshop and thought yes, here’s a good opportunity to give three hours to thinking about the thriller I started working on early this year. It was great. It helped me with the timeframe of the story and structure and it was reassuring because the work I have done so far can be used. It also gave me the ability to step back and see other directions.

I think it’s a luxury to find three or four hours where you get away from everything and just focus on your writing. I have an office at the back of a bookstore, although like many stores it may be closing soon, and since I’ve been there many people have come in to speak to me about their writing quandaries – from where do I start to how much do I need write down about my characters?
So I decided to plan a workshop so that people could pause and indulge in their writing and ideas for a morning. I go to a breakfast once a month at Greenhills On Tweed and it’s lovely and peaceful and the food is good so I thought what better place? So it will be a four-hour retreat into writing. Brunch Workshop – Feed Your Inner Writer. It’s from 9 am-1pm, 22nd October and includes brunch.
I am going to offer an appraisal of a couple of pages of writing or a synopsis for early bookers.

Workshops offer a good way of learning more about writing and ourselves without the commitment of a formal course. It’s still hard work of course but who’s afraid of that?
Marian

Slow and fast routes to setting up a website

For some months I have been working with a designer on overhauling my web presence. This blog is not really part of that. It is a relic from my dark past and I am developing new blogs for the website.Whether I keep this blog going is to be decided.
But for now it is running and for you have clicked and arrived here so I am going to do what it says on the tin and talk about slow and fast routes to setting up a website.
I have taken both routes. One is the route where you work with a graphic designer and the coding guy and it takes a while to first come up with the concept then to fiddle with the content and design and find something that meets the needs. My website is almost complete – there’s a little adjusting to do. You have to live with a site for a little while, a little like decorating and furnishing a house. Obviously there’s a cost to working with a designer but I must say I like it because the designer had ideas that I didn’t have, and made me think about my business and what I am offering.

The other way to create a website is to build one yourself. I have done that here for myself and also as a teaching tool. I sometimes teach and help people to write and plan content for their websites. I teach this at workshops with a colleague who teaches about the technicalities of setting up the site. It’s not that technical but takes up a lot less time when someone walks you through it. I also help individuals and businesses draft their content for their websites. The main thing is to help them take the focus off who they are (and where they were born) and put that into addressing the wants and needs of their clients.

More on that later…