Author: Catherine

Categories
Copyediting

Choosing an editor: a guide for self-publishing authors

As a self-published author, it’s your responsibility to make sure your book is as good as it can be. An editor can help to make your book look professional instead of amateurish.

Editing your own work: getting off to a good start

Many people will tell you that you can’t edit your own work. That’s correct; you need a fresh and impartial pair of eyes. What you can do, though, is get your work into the best possible shape before you hand it over to an editor. This will save them time and, more importantly, you money!

woman sitting cross-legged and working on laptop
Definitely not me this time.

Ask your peers – other writers – for their opinions. Join local writing groups. Meet writers online and ask them to have a look at one or two chapters for you. Don’t be shy about getting feedback from your fellow writers.

Every writer is focused on their own work, so make sure you contribute something back to the community by returning the favour for others.

Now is also a good time to write a synopsis. This is a skill in itself, so practice is good. Don’t forget that a synopsis is different from a blurb – it should be about one A4 page long, contain all the major plot points and describe what happens in your book. Don’t worry about spoilers!

Writing a synopsis is a great way of identifying weaknesses or plot holes. Read it out loud. Does it ramble or sound boring? Do things seem to happen for no reason? Maybe you just need to tweak the synopsis, or maybe you need to go back to the book and make some changes there.

When you feel happy with your book, that’s the right time to look for an editor. But wait! Do you know what you’re asking them to do, and does that match up with what you need?

Different types of editing

Think about what you expect an editor to do for you. For instance, you might envisage them:

• making sure the spelling is correct
• making the writing ‘flow’
• improving your style by, for example, removing excess adjectives or pointing out clichés

Or you might picture your editor:

• suggesting ways to make the dialogue less clunky
• helping to reveal the motives of the villain
• flagging up areas where the timeline or chapter ordering makes the story unclear and suggesting solutions

These are all things an editor could do, but they are different types of requests and may need different types of editors.

A structural or developmental editor will look at ‘big picture’ stuff like plot, characterisation, themes, voice, dialogue, pace and flow. They’ll look at how everything fits together and pick up on major inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

A copy-editor will look at spelling, punctuation, grammar, style, consistency, wording and legal issues. Their job is to get your manuscript ready for typesetting. They’ll help you make sure your work is accurate and fit-for-purpose.

There may be some crossover between those types of editing – a copy-editor might query plot holes and a developmental editor might flag up grammatical ‘tics’ – but, in general, developmental editing looks at the big picture and copy-editing looks at the fine details.

If you choose one type of editing when you really need the other, it’s frustrating for all concerned. No editor wants to spend hours correcting your spelling only for you to rewrite or delete entire chapters. And you don’t get the result you wanted.

What type of editor do you need?

‘But wait!’ I hear you cry. ‘I can’t afford all these rounds of editing! What should I prioritise?’

I’m a copy-editor, so naturally my advice would be not to skimp on the copy-edit. A lot of developmental work can be done in advance with feedback from other writers. That’s not to put down developmental editors – actually, I think they have a harder job than I do! – but if you’re on a limited budget you might only be able to afford one type of editing. No matter how great your book is, it will look terrible if it’s riddled with typos.

A word to the wise: if you’re releasing your book as an ebook only, and not getting it printed, don’t look for a proofreader. A proofreader checks your book after it’s been typeset for print (here is some more information about the difference between proofreading and copy-editing if you’re interested), so if that isn’t going to happen, proofreading isn’t what you need.

I strongly recommend you use an editor who is experienced at preparing manuscripts for conversion into ebook formats, as the requirements for ebooks are quite different from those for print.

How to find the right editor for you

Look no further! I specialise in working with self-publishing and ‘DIY’ authors. I’ll help you to get your book ready for ebook conversion and distribution, as well as for printing if necessary.

If for some inexplicable reason you don’t want me to edit your book, look for someone who has worked on similar projects. Your country’s industry body for editors may have a directory you can use (in the UK this is the SfEP Directory of Editorial Services). You can also ask other self-published authors for their recommendations.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions! Prepare a list before you make an approach. You have every right to query anything you don’t understand.

Pricing

Don’t be put off if an editor doesn’t list prices on their website. Some charge per word or per thousand words; others, like me, base their charges on how long the job is likely to take, so they won’t be able to give you a quotation until they’ve looked at your manuscript. Neither approach is ‘better’ than the other; they each have their pros and cons and both methods are used by professionals.

It’s time to go ahead!

A good editor should respond to your enquiry within a reasonable length of time. They should be upfront about the likely cost and clear about what they can do for you. It’s important for both of you to be confident about the scope of the work. Most editors will have terms and conditions; ask to see them before work starts.

They should send you a sample edit of part of your work to give you an idea of their approach. You can decide whether they’re a good fit for you and whether they respect your ‘tone of voice’.

Once you’ve found an editor who is on your wavelength, it’s time to go ahead! Stay tuned for my next blog post about how to work with your editor to get the most out of their service.

Categories
Proofreading

Get your ebook ready for self-publishing

Are you thinking about self-publishing or distributing your work yourself as an ebook?

If so, you need to make sure you engage an editor who understands the ebook conversion process. They can help make sure your work is correctly formatted to avoid errors in the final digital file. But there is a lot that you can do yourself beforehand to make the process easy and pain-free. Here are a few tips to help you create professional-looking ebooks!

person reading an ebook

Something to bear in mind …

An ebook is a different beast from a traditionally printed book. If you use an e-reader yourself, you’ll know that you can change the text size, the margins, and even the font on the display. When you’re getting a book ready for print, all these things are crucial. You may be working with a typesetter or spending hours getting everything ‘just so’ in Word or InDesign. But if the reader can change the appearance themselves, how does that affect the way you need to format your work? Is it a waste of time to focus on the appearance of the text on the page?

If you’re having your book printed as well as producing an ebook, it’s definitely not a waste of time. You’ll still need a print-ready file that looks just as you want it to. However, you’ll need a separate copy of the file ready to format for ebook, because the requirements are different.

Keep it simple

When formatting an ebook, less is more. Almost all the formatting is stripped out during conversion, so there’s no point doing anything fancy. By keeping everything as simple as possible, you reduce the risk of introducing anything that will be too distracting to the reader. After all, you want them to focus on what you’ve written, not on what it looks like.

To make things easier for yourself, switch on the ‘Show nonprinting characters’ option – click the button that looks like this:

non-printing characters key

 

 

This displays the formatting marks, showing all the formatting you’ve used – spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks, tabs, page breaks, the works. This makes it easier to see what you’ve done and will help you to strip out extraneous formatting.

Spaces

Remove rogue spaces from the beginnings and ends of paragraphs. This can be a tedious job, but it’s worth it, because extra spaces often stand out on an e-reader.

Full stops

Don’t use double spaces after full stops. You can use the ‘Find and replace’ tool to remove them. You might have been taught to use them at school, but in an ebook they make the text look gappy and unprofessional, and professional typesetters don’t use them. In some cases, a double space even converts to no space at all, resulting in words that are run together.

If you’re a heavy-handed typist you might also want to check for the odd accidental triple space – they have been known to occur!

Hyphens & line breaks

Turn hyphenation off and don’t force line breaks. Even if you don’t like where a line breaks, remember that if the reader changes the font size, the line breaks will shift anyway. If you add a hyphen manually, there’s a danger that it will end up stuck in the middle of a line at random, looking like a mistake. Similarly, don’t try to correct widows and orphans.

Page numbers

Don’t include page numbers – ebook files don’t have universal page numbers, but some devices will allocate page numbers depending on the reader’s settings. E-reader devices usually tell the reader how far along in the book they are – e. g. ‘Page x out of y’ or ‘43% completed’. This also means that page numbers in your table of contents will be irrelevant.

Paragraphs

Decide whether you’re going to use block or run-on paragraphs and stick with the same format throughout. Block paragraphs have a line space between them, while run-on paragraphs don’t have any line space between them but have the first line indented instead. If you use run-on paragraphs, remember not to indent the first paragraph of each chapter or section.

And don’t use the tab key to indent your paragraphs – use the ‘First line indent’ tool on Word’s ribbon.

Chapters

When you want to start a new chapter, insert a page break. Don’t just keep hitting Enter until a new page appears! Use the ‘Show nonprinting characters’ option to help you get rid of extra paragraph returns at the beginning and end of each chapter.

Rather than formatting each chapter heading manually, use Word’s styles function to set a heading style and apply it to each one. Which brings me neatly on to …

Styles

Use Word’s Styles palette to organise your chapter headings, subheadings, body text etc. If you don’t know how to use this, or any other tools within Word, there’s a wealth of information online, and it’ll be well worth your while to learn how it works because it will save you a lot of formatting headaches. Before you submit your manuscript, check that you’ve applied the relevant style to each part of your text.

Out of the ordinary

If you want to use ‘fancy’ formatting – such as headers, footers, borders, special fonts, coloured text, multi-column layouts, lots of illustrations or tables etc. – you might want to consider opting for a fixed layout ebook rather than a reflowable epub.

Certain elements, like decorative drop caps or special chapter/section dividers, can be inserted as images, but if there are a lot of them, you’re better off getting some professional help with the conversion to make sure you get the result you’re after. You can certainly include images in ePub and MOBI files, but some ereaders display them in grayscale, so make sure that your images work in grayscale as well as in colour.

Use the style guide

This final tip might sound blindingly obvious, but it can make the difference between getting your ebook accepted or rejected by stores: if you’re submitting your document to a site that has a style guide, use it! Sometimes it can look complicated, but take the time to work through it and you will reap the rewards later.

It’s time to get your book proofread!

Hopefully you will have started the marketing for your book while you were still tidying up the early drafts. If not, you’ll need to build in some lead-in time while you generate a bit of hype. But that’s a post for another day! I’ll assume you’ve got that side of things covered and all you’ve got left to do is get your book proofread to make sure there are no stray apostrophes or references to the ‘pubic domain’. 

If you’ve followed the steps above, your proofreader will have less work to do – saving them time and saving you money!

Good luck!

Categories
Copyediting

Live, edit and learn

When I’m copy-editing, my job involves fact-checking. Do I know everything? Far from it! Even when I’m editing a book on a topic I’m familiar with, I still need to double- and triple-check some facts. This means that I learn a lot during the course of a job. Here’s a snapshot of some of my recent searches and a few snippets of knowledge. Hopefully, some of you will learn something new, too!

Balkan peninsula topographic map

  1. The Anemoi are wind gods in Greek mythology – Boreas, Notus, Zephyrus and Eurus (spellings may vary!).
  2. The Balkan countries are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia. Parts of Greece and Turkey are also located within the Balkan Peninsula. There is some disagreement over which countries are included in the definition.
  3. The cervical vertebrae are located in the neck. They are nowhere near the cervix!
  4. It’s surprisingly difficult to find out exactly how many times David Cameron met with François Hollande.
  5. Fenugreek is widely believed to help with lactation, although it hasn’t been conclusively proven. (I was actually breastfeeding when I discovered this, but I’ve never taken fenugreek!) Substances that increase milk supply are known as galactagogues, which sound like threatening alien lifeforms. 
  6. Frumenty is a old English dish made with grains.
  7. A Lavaliere is a type of necklace originally popularised in France. The word has also been adopted in the US to describe various ceremonies around sororities and fraternities.
  8. Strigoi are vampires, ‘the undead’ or a mixture of different concepts.
  9. Super-jacked cattle exist – and pigs could be next.
  10. Sympathomimetic drugs mimic the function of the sympathetic nervous system (well, duh!).

Click on the links above, store away the knowledge for future reference … and wait with anticipation to see which adverts get served to you next. You’re welcome!

Categories
Proofreading

How to proofread your own work

‘Proofread your own work?’ I hear you say. ‘But that’s ridiculous! You proofreaders are always telling us it’s impossible!’ And it is impossible to proofread your own work to the same standard as a trained and impartial professional. But if you use common sense and a keen eye, you can get your manuscript to a good standard before it hits the copy-editor’s or proofreader’s desk – and hopefully save yourself a few spondoolies! Here are my tips on how to go about it.

  • Read your work out loud. This is the single most important thing you can do when trying to polish your own writing. Don’t worry about sounding ridiculous. Shut the door. Wait until everyone has gone out if you have to. And, most importantly, take your time about it. Reading a piece out loud will show up a multitude of sins. If you slow down and really look at what you’re reading, it should help you to spot any missing little words. You may spot other errors as well.
  • Read each line backwards. That’s the next step. Invest in some ink and paper and print out your manuscript so that you can hold a piece of card under each line, just like when you were learning to read at school. Most of my proofreading is done on screen, but I still find it easier to see mistakes in a printed passage. If you can afford it, do it. Read each line backwards, a word at a time.
person proofreading sitting at desk with papers
A Lesser-Spotted English Proofreader in its native habitat.

Those are my two top tips – a couple of basic principles, if you like. Here are some pitfalls to watch out for.

  • Run a search for ‘pubic’. You won’t regret it. (Unless you’re actually writing about genitals, of course, in which case you’ll probably find yourself typing ‘public’ by accident.) If you mention martial arts at all, you might also want to search for ‘marital’.
  • Consistency is key. You may have noticed that apostrophes and quotation marks can be curly or straight depending on which font is used. Make sure all yours are consistent. Even if you’re sure you’ve applied the same font throughout, you might be surprised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a manuscript where the odd ‘odd’ apostrophe hasn’t crept in.
  • Pay special attention to the letters f, i, l and t, especially when they crop up close together. Check that ls aren’t is and is aren’t ts, or vice versa. Check that double letters aren’t triple.

There are also a few simple things you can do to make it much easier to format your book for print or digital distribution.

  • Please don’t use double spaces. Not after full stops; not anywhere. It takes seconds to run a ‘find and replace’. Watch out for triple spaces if you’re a heavy-handed typist!
  • Get rid of spaces at the ends of paragraphs. I know the feeling only too well – you’re typing away and your thumb automatically adds a space at the end of the sentence. But you don’t need one at the end of a paragraph.
  • Use Word’s ‘Styles’ function. If you don’t know what it is or how to use it, there are plenty of tutorials out there. Take some time to figure it out and your copy-editor will thank you for it.

I could add a lot more, but that’s enough to be going on with! Remember the three golden rules: 

  • read it out loud,
  • read it backwards, and
  • take your time!
Categories
Events London Book Fair

London Book Fair 2017

This year’s London Book Fair was a totally different experience for me than last year’s. I had my baby daughter with me this year, but at least I could trundle her in a buggy instead of schlepping her around in my belly! As I said in my blog post for Help For Writers, I conducted several meetings sitting on the floor, but I think most authors appreciated the fact that I don’t stand on my dignity all the time. At least, I hope they did …

I wasn’t on a stand this year, either, and I enjoyed being able to roam free. Out of all my scheduled meetings there was only one person who didn’t show up at all, with no warning – and they contacted me afterwards to apologise! This made quite a change from my previous experiences in a different industry. What a nice lot you authors are! I hope to give everyone the same respect in return.

I also popped over to see the folks on the SfEP stand – always nice to say hello and put some faces to names. 

So, what’s new in the publishing world? There was a bigger emphasis on self-publishing this year, with the expansion of the Author HQ area and more services targeted at self-publishing authors. It’s good to see that there isn’t any technology that can do the copy-editor’s job … yet! I don’t think there ever will be, but by the time I’m 90 I might be eating my words (hopefully not in paper form).

I’m conscious that I haven’t been blogging as much as usual since the sproglet was born, and I hope to get back into the groove with more regular posts. You can look forward to some tips about how best to proofread your own work. And if there’s anything specific you’d like me to cover, please contact me and let me know!

baby sitting at the start of the yellow brick road
Someone wanted to follow the yellow brick road …
Categories
Copyediting Proofreading

Why I’m not a grammar Nazi

 

You’d think that, as a copy-editor and proofreader, I’d be the archetypal grammar Nazi. And it’s true that sometimes I have to take a strict approach to the manuscripts that pass across my desk. But, contrary to popular belief, not every editor or proofreader goes around correcting grocer’s apostrophe’s. Here’s why bad spelling and grammar doesn’t bother me.

Catherine Dunn grammar Nazi
Don’t ever let me catch you putting a hyphen there again.

Rather than whetting your appetite and then working up to a denouement like a good writer should, I’ll start with the reason that’s most important to me: some people just struggle with these things through no fault of their own. Some of the brainiest people I know have dyslexia. Many more don’t have a diagnosed condition but simply find writing hard. Chances are, they’ve got strengths in another area and it’s not my place to point the finger, judge or laugh.

That by itself is, for me, a good enough reason to dial down the outrage. Being a decent human being and having a bit of empathy isn’t that hard. But there’s a couple more …

  • Sometimes I’m not very good at writing myself.

Or should that be: sometimes I, myself, am not very good at writing.

You get the idea. Doing this job, it’s important that everything I write that’s for public consumption is polished and perfect. I go over my text time and time again trying to make sure I’ve got the best possible phrasing. And that’s before I’ve combed it for typos, missing full points and other embarrassing errors. I’m sure some still slip through the net. I’m not a professional writer. If I was, I’d be writing my own books instead of editing and proofreading other people’s. I just know the rules and make sure they’re applied (or, sometimes, create my own!). So I sympathise with the writer’s struggle.

  • I’m lazy at heart.

Picking out people’s errors is work. It’s not my hobby. I enjoy what I do for a living, but everyone needs to switch off sometimes for the sake of their mental health. I’m far too lazy to get worked up about somebody’s innocent mistake. I might look for an opportunity to slip them a business card, but I’m certainly not going to waste my time getting hot under the collar.

So, writers: write away. I’m not judging you. (I can if you want, though, for the right price …)

Categories
Copyediting Proofreading

Who needs a proofreader or copy-editor?

When I’m talking to people about what I do, they tend to assume that I work with authors and that the bulk of my work is on novels. I love copy-editing fiction, and I particularly enjoy working directly with self-publishing authors, but there are many other groups of people who need the services of a proofreader or copy-editor. It’s not just about books – any piece of writing, no matter how short, might need some attention!

misspelled public schools sign
Proofreader’s law: the bigger the font, the harder it is to spot a mistake.*

 

You expect well-known brands to get ‘simple’ things like spelling and grammar right. If they don’t, it undermines the customer’s trust in the brand. This also applies to small companies, but you’re more likely to cut them some slack – you might trust Greg down the road to repair ‘all kinds of car’s’, but you want Mercedes to pay the same detailed attention to their grammar as you hope they do to your car!

Very large companies probably employ a team of proofreaders and copy-editors to make sure anything that goes out to the public with their name on it is correct. As a freelancer, I’m more likely to work with small- to medium-sized businesses. If you need a way to stand out from your competitors and give yourself the edge, making sure your spelling and grammar is perfect is one way of winning over customers who are sitting on the fence.

Proofreading and copy-editing that I do for businesses includes:

  • Adverts for print and online. It’s particularly embarrassing if something is spelled wrong in an advert, and they often cost a lot of money.
  • Leaflets and other hard copy promotional material – often given out at trade shows or with purchases. No one wants to be left with 500 misspelled t-shirts …
  • Brochures. Something glossy and well-designed is often intended for clients who want to part with their spondoolies.
  • Recruitment materials. High-calibre applicants want to feel as though they’ll fit right in.
  • Legal documents. I can’t advise on legalities, but I can make sure spellings are correct!
  • Social media updates. They can be seen by tens of thousands of people. Even if a company doesn’t have a big following, something embarrassing can go viral in the blink of an eye.
  • Letters. Yes, they are still sent occasionally! An eloquent letter on thick paper, embossed with a crest, thanking Greg for his tip-top repair to the Prime Minister’s Mercedes would fall a bit flat if it was addressed to ‘Grge’. ‘Impossible!’ I hear you say. Hmm, just ask any Louise how often they’ve been a ‘Lousie’ …
  • Blog posts. They are really important when it comes to driving traffic to websites, so most businesses will have a regularly-updated blog or news section. Perhaps one person writes all the content; perhaps they use several members of staff or guest bloggers with different areas of expertise; whatever the approach, everyone wants their blog to look professional.
  • Web pages. A shop window to the world. An error-free website can give one company the edge over the competition just by virtue of making them look slicker and more detail-oriented.
  • Reports. They could be annual reports or reports about a specific project. They might be aimed at shareholders, sponsors or the general public.

These points don’t just apply to businesses that sell products or services. Not-for-profit companies and charities produce all of the things listed above, and they want to project a professional image to sponsors, donors and the public as well as the people they help.

As well as work for businesses, I also proofread and copy-edit for:

  • Publishing houses. Many of them employ freelancers – sometimes through an agency – rather than in-house editors and proofreaders.
  • Students and academics. If someone’s academic work is being published by a traditional publishing company, it will usually come to me via the publisher or an agency, but some academics want to self-publish, and students are often allowed to use a proofreader on their theses provided the content is original.
  • Self-publishing authors. My favourite group of people to work with. They might have written fiction or non-fiction; thanks to my contact with authors I’ve read some amazing books on a wide variety of topics and across a range of genres.

I hope this has given you a bit more insight into the life of a proofreader and copy-editor. As you can see, it’s about a lot more than just reading books. If you know someone you think might benefit from any of these services, please send them my way and I will make their copy ship-shape!

*Image courtesy of Mascola.

Categories
Personal Reading

Children’s books: my favourites & recommendations

Reading to a baby from an ABC book
Trying to get my baby interested in reading.

During the last few weeks I’ve probably handled more hard copy books than I usually pick up in a year. As I try to get my baby interested in books I remember all the books I read and loved as a child. Here are some of my favourites.

Reading to a baby from an ABC book
Trying to get my baby interested in reading.

The Ladybird ABC book – the first book I had as a child, and the book that (alongside my parents, of course!) taught me to read. I’m told I was a ridiculously early reader (I don’t remember learning), and my mother credits this book, where you can clearly see not only the letter, but the letter within the word and the picture all on the same spread. It didn’t take me long to make the connection between the big ‘a’ and the smaller ‘a’ within the word ‘apple’.

The Magic Faraway Tree
Just look at those illustrations! I wish I could photograph every page.

Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. Blyton gets dissed a lot but I loved Dick and Fanny – not to mention Bessie and Joe. My view might be slightly coloured by the gorgeous illustrations in this edition, though. They are lush, and perfectly complement the trippy stories about a tree with its topmost branches touching a rotating carousel of magical lands, all with different, weird and wonderful themes. The tree’s inhabitants include a man with the moon for a head and a man who wears a suit made out of saucepans. What’s not to love?

Noddy and Big-Ears
Noddy and Big-Ears go to the seaside.

At the risk of wallowing in a Blyton nostalgia-fest I was also a big fan of Little Noddy. I didn’t notice the racist golliwogs at the time; I was just captivated by Noddy and his red and yellow car. The image above is from Noddy Goes to the Seaside.

The Flower Fairies
Be careful you don’t misspell ‘Poppy’. We don’t want a ‘Poopy’ fairy. We get enough poop in other aspects of life.

Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies series is just delightful, and another series which is made by its illustrations. The charming poems also teach facts about each of the flowers; facts which are made more memorable by being cloaked in whimsical verse. Perfect if you don’t want girlie pinkified fairies for your daughter (some of the ‘flower fairies’ are male, and none of them sparkle) but don’t want to completely abandon magic.

Paddington Bear
I can vouch for the fact that marmalade chunks make excellent glue.

He’s very topical at the moment thanks to the recent film (and a forthcoming one in 2017), but I’ve been a fan of Paddington Bear since childhood. The dry, straight-faced humour appeals to children and adults alike, and Michael Bond also pulls off a slapstick line of physical comedy which is very hard to do in writing. And who wouldn’t love to be able to do Paddington’s trademark hard stare?

Jennings, White Fang, the Shadow in the North
Books for slightly older readers.

When she’s older, I hope my daughter will, like me, come to love Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books, White Fang by Jack London and The Shadow in the North by Philip Pullman. The world of an all-boys boarding school might be dated, but it has a beguiling innocence and some laugh-out-loud moments. Throughout the decades, kids haven’t fundamentally changed and they have always got up to ‘mischief’. Philip Pullman needs no introduction … White Fang is not only a firm favourite but also a gateway to the harder-hitting, more adult Tales of the Klondike, which I read as a teenager and would heartily recommend. It taught me one thing – never light your fire underneath a snow-covered tree. The snow will melt and drop on your fire, smothering it and leaving you to die in the frozen wastes. You’re welcome.

Jinny, The Machine-Gunners and Harry Potter
Spot the wild card.

It might be an obvious, some would say cheesy, choice, but I’ve jumped enthusiastically on the Harry Potter bandwagon and can’t wait to read J. K. Rowling’s famous series to my daughter. Robert Westall’s The Machine-Gunners is also a classic these days, I believe (that makes me feel old!) and I love his down-to-earth style. There are quite a few lesser-known Westall books for my daughter to discover, including The Wind Eye and his collection of short horror stories for adults. My ‘wild card’ is the Jinny series of horse stories by Patricia Leitch, which are as far from middle class pony club romps as it’s possible to get and still involve horses. When I was younger I wanted to be the feisty, red-haired Jinny and to ride as fearlessly as she did. Each book (there are twelve) has a horse-related storyline together with a more meaningful facet to the plot where our heroine discovers more about herself and gradually becomes a less selfish and more respectful person who cares about the world around her.

There you go – my pick of books for young and older children. Some of these are obvious, but I hope some of you benefit from the more obscure recommendations. And if my daughter doesn’t enjoy any of these, I hope I won’t be too disappointed but will continue to nurture a love of reading through books that she does like!

Categories
Personal

Oh baby baby …

I try to avoid posting anything personal on here, but I have to proffer an excuse for my recent silence on the blogging front. I gave birth to my daughter in early August, so I haven’t had much work-related excitement to inspire any posts.

reusable nappies on washing line
My idea of a productive day during the last six weeks

From Monday I’ll be back at the grindstone and ‘open for business’ again (proofreading and copy-editing business, that is!). One client has asked for a critique, so I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into that.

I can’t wait until my daughter is old enough to enjoy a bedtime story, but I did resist the temptation to call her Paige after my line of work.

Categories
Events

Coming up: writing & literature events

I’ve had my nose buried in a tricky copy-editing job and only just surfaced for air. In the name of professionalism I can’t post about work I’m actually doing, and I’ve been living and breathing this particular subject for several weeks. I’ve even dreamed about the references!

As a result I’ve fallen behind on finding out what is going on in the world of writing and literature, so in the process of catching up I thought I would compile a few of the writing/literature events taking place in the UK in August to October.

Steve Bowkett workshop story grids

One event I’m particularly looking forward to is Leicestershire author Steve Bowkett’s workshop on ‘Story Grids: Techniques to Improve Your Writing’, which will take place on 3 October, 14:00-16:30 at The Dock, 75 Exploration Drive, Leicester, LE4 5NU. Steve aims to help you form a narrative organically and ‘take your mind by surprise’. The workshop will look at building the key elements of a story and sustaining reader involvement. It’s not specific to any particular genre, so there should be something for everyone! Book onto this workshop.

Steve’s workshop is taking place as part of the Everybody’s Reading Festival.