BLACKWATER WRITINGS

I'm sat here wondering what to write. It's not that my well has already dried up and that I've got no more advice to give it's just that it's been a long week and I haven't had much time to give much thought to my blog, but here I am determined to get my Friday post written and uploaded.  The photograph I've shared was taken the day before yesterday. It was around noon and I was out walking around in the neighbourhood where I live.   As I said in a previous post, I live in Toledo, Spain and as I said in another previous post, I don't plan on turning this blog into a full travel blog, but there are times when I am out walking and I say to myself that I must be crazy not to include at least a few travel posts here and there or about my life in Spain. Well, maybe some day, but that day is not today.  Right, that's enough stalling...time to get on with today's post and today I'd like to talk about...drum roll...when we put too much unnecessary st...

For a lot of people, January is the Monday of the year and for a lot of people Monday is the bluest day that there is so I hope you're all enjoying and making the most of these early days of 2023.  I've stated before that reading is a huge and important part of writing and well, here I am saying it again.  I don't really follow New Year's resolutions, but I do like to try and increase my reading each year and that's exactly what I did last year and what I hope to do this year.  In today's post I'm going to share with you some of the books I read last year and again, like previous posts - take it or leave it! I want to point out that today's post isn't a Top (insert number here), but it is just to give you an idea of the content this amateur writer checked out in the year 2022 and it is also worth mentioning that almost every book I read in the past year was not even from that year, but that's neither here nor there. I would also like to say that ...

For today's post I'm excited to say that work has started on the follow-up to my debut novella, Black Water Valley. This new one is going to be called Pigeon's Port.  Actually, I've just told a lie because work started on Pigeon's Port in around October 2022, but because I didn't do as much background work as I should have, I had to take a break and do more pre-writing work.  What is pre-writing work? For me, it's doing character profiles and plot points. Two important things which I'll get into in a small bit of detail for today's post.  With character profiles, what I like to do is write a profile for each key character that's going to play a role. I'll write down their age, maybe a basic description, their likes and dislikes and also their motives for the duration of the project I'm working on.  And then for the plot points, I usually write down 10 major plot points which need to happen over the duration of the project. If it exceeds t...