Each month we try to have an Autumn Voices member contribute to the blog. This could be anything from poetry to pottery and if you’d like to be a guest blogger then apply once you’re logged in as a member.
My friend emailed me yesterday to say that she and her husband are moving house next week. They’re moving to a smaller and more manageable one-storey house with a garden.
Audrey was getting me a glass of water after I’d ferried some rescued paving stones through her house to her neglected back garden, untouched since her husband died. I’d already cut back some brambles and discovered some grass underneath and she now needed a solid path to be able to get out there to enjoy … Continue reading If you don’t like cats, look away now…
Loneliness has become a visible public health issue, particularly at this time of year when corporate and media organisations’ Christmas and New Year messages have been about making – or remaking – connections with others. You can see the start of this trend, aimed particularly at older people, in advertising from 2015 onwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_%26_Partners_Christmas_advert However, despite … Continue reading Connections
Gill is 64 (so currently pensionless) and lives in rural Scotland surrounded by books. She is a permaculture and forest gardener, a climate change resister, a stickler for honesty and integrity, a breast cancer survivor, an intersectional socialist feminist, and a single parent of twins. She has trained and worked in organisational development for over … Continue reading Guest blogger for January
I hope you were able to have the best Christmas possible under the circumstances. As you will have heard many times over, it’s not what happens to us it’s how we respond to it. The same applies to when we send our manuscripts out into the world. Providing we’ve done everything we can to make … Continue reading Making Plans for 2021
We asked you to submit questions for Angelena to answer on the subject of publishing, marketing and promoting a book, and also being an older writer. You gave us some excellent questions for Angelena to turn her expert attention to, and you can listen to her answers right here on this special podcast recording:
With thanks to Angelena for sparing her time to do this. Her last December blog for us on this theme appears soon.
Firstly, self-publishing is NOT vanity publishing, nor is it particularly difficult. Amazon and other online publishers take you through the process of formatting and uploading your book cover, text, blurb and the important bits like price and special promotions. Within less than twenty-four hours your book goes live. Of course, there are lots of companies … Continue reading Self Publishing and the Marketing Mountain
The dream for most authors is to be taken on by a literary agency who will secure a big advance with one of the major publishers – The Big Five – negotiate a film contract and manage their careers into the stratosphere for the rest of their natural writing life. Sadly, except for those already … Continue reading Agents, Publishers and Big Mistakes
We’re deep into NaNoWrMo and if any of you are currently bashing out the draft of that novel that’s been festering in your mental filing cabinet, then I wish you all the best. The writing part of a book is the easy part. It might not feel like it when you’re sweating away over your … Continue reading A Publishing Minefield
Our current guest blogger for Autumn Voices is Angelena Boden.
“When humanity exterminates other creatures, it is sawing off the limb on which it is sitting, destroying working parts of our own life-support system.” Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University My previous blog took the story in Ancient Anchors up to the Scientific Revolution. In the fourth and last section of the book Gaia takes us … Continue reading Sixth Mass Extinction
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.” Anais Nin In writing Ancient Anchors, my next challenge following the character of Gaia was to create a narrative that … Continue reading The Meaning of Life from the Ancients to the Scientific Revolution
As I explained in my last blog, Ancient Anchors tells the story of the Earth and her relationship with her inhabitants from the Big Bang to the modern day…
This is a story: of evolution, of the earth, of Homo Sapiens, of organisms, ideas, trade, colonisation, wars, and those ideas and concepts that we as a species hang onto. But it’s also a story of how a germ of an idea evolved into my latest book, Ancient Anchors.
