Writing, Speaking and Publishing

Well, Saturday was the start of an exciting week! I was asked to speak about e-publishing at a Writers' Day up in Inverness, run by the Scottish Association of Writers. As many of you know, I love to write on trains so the long journey north passed very nicely with a combination of writing, reading and watching the lovely scenery.

I arrived at the rather splendid, Gothic looking venue, The Town House, in time for the wonderful hot buffet lunch and enjoyed listening to another speaker before it was time for my own workshop talk. It's a subject I'm pleased to talk about and I'm always happy to share information about the amazing choices out there for writers these days, from the wealth of e-publishers accepting submissions to the ease of going it alone.

I'll mention here one of the important things I stressed. Most good e-publishers are exactly the same as traditional publishers in their professional attitude to accepting work and publishing. Rigorous editing, contracts, cover artists - all are provided by the publisher. My only problem now is writing fast enough to submit all the writing I want to finish for submission!

After the prize giving to competition winners, the Lord Provost of Inverness showed some of us around the wonderful building where Winston Churchill once sat at a cabinet meeting around the horseshoe shaped table. It was a delightful writerly day out and was worth the long journey home into the evening.

This week also sees the publication of my new full length historical novel, Midwinter Masquerade (as if you didn't know already!). It's releasing on Thursday from Tirgearr Publishing in Ireland, and I'm having my usual blog party celebration here and on Facebook on Monday 28th October. Hope to see you all there.

If anyone with Scottish connections fancies writing an article for Scottish Memories, they're looking for the following:

 

Features from 600 to 1200 words (and can accommodate 1800 words for a feature with lots of strong images) on any aspect of Scotland’s past. We’re keen to see ideas with a strong nostalgia feel, focusing particularly on people/places and things within living memory – right through to the late 1970s.

  

We’d also welcome your input for an upcoming feature we’re planning on various things that were better in bygone days (such as sweets in paper bags, TV programmes, packaging,etc). This will be a light-hearted look at why the past was so good and contributions of anything from one sentence to a paragraph is fine and we’ll send three copies of the mag as a thank you to anyone whose idea we feature.

 

Hope you had a great weekend,

Rosemary