De-blog

It's the holiday season! Fun first...  And a thought... I'm not going to get ranty, but however you celebrate, if you are one of the fortunate, take that little spark of festive magic and do something wonderful with it. It could be life-changing for someone else, and it will make you feel nice. Now the hard sell! :) Me? Hard sell? As if! I had a job doing door-to-door canvassing for a kitchen company once. I lasted a day. But! I am selling something, so here goes... I wanted to officially launch Checking Him Out For the Holidays , which is available to buy for around $2 / £1.25 via Beaten Track , Amazon (Kindle) , Smashwords , All Romance eBooks , and a few other places by now, I would imagine. If you went torrent hunting you might even find it there, but I'd rather you bought it. I took it as a sign that I was finally getting somewhere when my recent novel, Crying in the Rain , made it to the file-sharing sites within three days of release. There...

Next Monday (December 15th) marks the release of my second Christmas story of the year, Red Hot Christmas , so we'll start as we mean to go on, by officially revealing the FABULOUS cover, created by Natasha Snow . Natasha's a brilliant cover artist / designer, and such a great person to work with. For both Red Hot Christmas and Crying in the Rain , I gave her a brief outline of the story and her first ideas were what we eventually went with, even though I fuss and fret and go all around the world before I reach the conclusion that she had it right all along. I think it's what comes of writing a series, whereby Crying in the Rain and Red Hot Christmas are chronologically #5 and #11 (full list at end of post), although I wrote Red Hot Christmas last Christmas, and wrote Crying in the Rain during the summer. By this point, the characters are so familiar to me that I have a clear picture in my head of what they are like - it's more of a psychological profile...

There is a school of thought which argues authors shouldn't read reviews of their work, because reviews are written for other would-be readers. Furthermore, those who argue for free expression in reviews contend that once the work is out there, it is a product, just like any other, and authors should not take it personally if a reviewer hates their 'product'. I can agree with this sentiment - up to a point - and it is precisely why we SHOULD read our reviews. In every industry, customer feedback is used to improve products and services. Likewise, if we authors don't read our reviews, we can not improve our product. That said, a piece of creative writing is not the same as an engine part, or a sofa, or a coffee maker, for whilst the inventor of a new and innovative product might well pour their heart and soul into it, the end product that we buy off the production line is tried, tested and far removed from that initial creative endeavour. A bad review for a vacuum cl...