Now for your reading pleasure: "The Awful German Language" by Mark Twain. Free download for Kindle (.mobi) or Nook etc. (.epub)

New black 'Normal is Boring' T-Shirts are now available from my shop. Are you nuts? Do you have a loony friend? Check them out in my Cafepress Shop!

I did it, I did it, I did it! I wrote a 50,000 word novel in a month as part of NaNoWriMo.

Now I'm going to get my first book to a professional critique service, and then - hopefully soon - I'll be a published author. Keep watching this space!

(oh, and now that I can do other things than write like mad every day, there will be more on self-publishing and IT issues in this blog, I promise!)

My web host was hacked recently, and many sites, including my own, had a trojan added to them.

If you have visited recently, please run a thorough virus check as a matter of urgency!

I'm terribly sorry about this, people :(

Ten days into the challenge and so far I've been able to keep up (barely). Spare time is but a dream at the moment, of course, but it will be great to know if it can actually be done (given that my first book took two years to complete)

Good heavens, it's hard to silence my inner editor. Right now I'm barely making the required number of words per day - I want to go back over everything I write to polish it, and it's taking a great effort to stop myself. Another 1000 words to do today. Not a problem per se - just hand me that duck tape, will you?

Well, this one is going to be a hands-on exercise for anybody who hasn’t used styles before. I’m going to describe it for Word 2000, but other word processors should be fairly similar. If in doubt, search the built-in help for keywords like ‘apply style’ or ‘edit style’ to find where they’re hiding.

If you’re thinking of writing a book, there’s one thing you can’t do without: a word processor. Or, alternatively, a time machine that allows you to travel back to an age where publishers still accepted manuscripts written in beautiful copperplate handwriting and bound in waxed canvas.
You decided on the word processing software? Good choice...