Satima's Blogspot: Editing

Showing posts with label Editing. Show all posts

Thursday, 19 January 2012

Real self-publishing

Thursday, January 19, 2012 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

Graham Clements, a colleague on the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre's spec-fic mailing list, recently complained on his blog that he'd just read a book from a well-known publisher and found rather a lot of typos.

I am not surprised by the news. In the current economic climate, I suspect that a lot of shortcuts and cutbacks are being made by publishers. But on the brighter side, I'm pleased to report that more and more self-publishers are engaging freelance editors before uploading their work.

I like to distinguish between self-publishing and what used to be called 'vanity publishing'. A better name for it might be 'desperation publishing' because it seems to pull in people who haven't a clue how to get their work out there and in desperation they pay some dodgy outfit to publish their books.

Bad idea.

Much better to do it yourself.

True self-publishing means that you engage your own editor, designer, layout person and printing firm and buy your own ISBN, which makes you a publisher in your own right and therefore a true 'self-publisher'. Paying some firm, even a relatively reliable one, to do all those tasks for a few hundred dollars — well, you get the book you deserve! Three rounds of editing, which used to be the standard at publishing houses, don't come cheap, and nor do all the other services needed to get a book up to scratch.

With vanity publishing, editing is the first thing to go. If you're lucky you'll get a light copy-edit, and some firms don't even do that much, even though they say they do! If you absolutely must publish through a vanity press, at least get your work edited first by a reliable freelance. Like me. (Ok, a bit of self-promotion there, but I'd be the first to admit that I'm not the only one! Check out the listings on the Society of Editors website for your state.)

But I can’t afford it! I hear you cry.

If you do the sums, it is indeed frightening. Three rounds of editing will take at least 40 hours. Most editors charge at least $40 per hour, and many charge more, so it’s safest to allow a minimum of $2000 for editing. Allow another thousand for your ISBN, art and layout. So an e-book is going to set you back about $3,000, and a print book a good deal more. For a firm to advertise that it can do it for a tenth of that price, you’re just not going to get as good a job, are you? As with all things, you get what you pay for.

But here’s the escape clause. You can cheat a bit by doing away with one round of editing. To do that, you need to have a very high standard of self-editing, friends in your critique group who are already advanced and proficient writers, and half a dozen beta-readers-cum-proofreaders with eagle eyes to pick up typos.

Here’s the sequence:
1.    Thoroughly learn your craft in regard to spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation.
2.    Join a crit group that contains writers more advanced than you are, people who, perhaps, have already had a few short stories or even novels published by traditional publishing houses. If you can’t find such a group, go to workshops. Lots of workshops. Or enrol in a writing class, online or face to face. Many people do all the above.
3.    Read as widely as you can on the craft of your own genre. (And it goes without saying that you will read other things as well, both fiction and non-fiction!)
4.    Be prepared to write, rewrite and rewrite again. Two full drafts are a minimum and you might find you need to do four or five!
5.    Only when you and your critters feel your book is as good as it can be, engage an editor. Most editors are honest souls who genuinely want to help writers, so ask the one you choose to give you a considered opinion of the story and the way you’ve written it. Editors vary in their procedures, but I like to do what I call a mini-assessment first, based on the first twenty or so pages and a synopsis – and I often find I have to teach the writer how to create a synopsis! So if this is one of your bugbears, read my article on The Specusphere about synopsis-writing.
6.    When you’ve finished working with your editor, find half a dozen new people willing to read your manuscript, making sure at least some of them have really good English skills and can pick up spelling and typographical errors (‘typos’).

This procedure will speed up the editing process enormously, saving you at least half the cost you’d have to pay if you sent your raw first draft to an editor.

Remember that anyone who wants money from you to publish your book is a vanity publisher, even if they claim not to be. Writers are much better advised to set up their own outfits, be their own bosses and have complete control over every stage of the work.

Let's face it, you aren't likely to make a fortune from any self-published book, although with e-publishing there are notable exceptions and anyone prepared to do a bit of marketing and promotion can at least hope to break even eventually. So why be a cheapskate? If you're doing it for love, surely it's better to spend more and be proud of what you've done? As my mother was fond of telling me, if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And a well-written, well-edited and well-presented self-published book can hold its head up in any company!

Labels: books on writing, Editing, self-publishing |

2 comments

Sunday, 11 December 2011

Mythic Resonance

Sunday, December 11, 2011 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

It's been a busy year: one in which I've bitten off more than I can comfortably chew. A bad habit of mine, but I can't seem to help myself - I get all fired up with enthusiasm whenever someone suggests a new project, and I wade in, boots and all, without testing the waters for depth.

So at the end of last year, when Stephen Thompson, our Editor-in-Chief at The Specusphere, decided to publish an anthology, I cheerfully volunteered my services. 'Wow, that'll be fun!' I told myself.

Well, yes. A qualified yes, because producing an anthology is not easy. Slush reading, negotiating with authors, editing, proofreading - it's taken a year to get there, but our destination, that magical place where we shall be rewarded with a Real Live book full of stories, is just around the next curve of what's been a long and winding bit of wayfaring.

When we first called for submissions, they were slow in coming and we started to panic a bit - what if we couldn't make up the quota? But gradually they started to trickle in, and the trickle eventually became a deluge! Some of the submissions were not within the guidelines - some not even close - and those were rejected at once. But the slow business of reading the fifty-odd that remained was angst-making.

It wasn't easy to pick the right content. There were seven of us reading, and most of us read all the submissions. We wanted stories based, however loosely, on traditional material: stories about the archetypal characters that we all know - the valiant hero, the boy on a quest, the trapped princess, the femme fatale, the monster from the deep ... the fabled beings we'd known and loved since childhood.

There were no truly awful stories, so it was a matter of choosing those that best fitted the guidelines and collectively provided a good sampling of the myths and legends of the world, presented with a twist that gave us something new and fresh rather than just a rewrite. And above all, of course, most of us had to at least like, and preferably love, the selected stories.

Reading the different reactions of the slush readers to the same stories was an eye-opener! We didn't quite come to blows, although I think we might have come close, once or twice, had we not been separated by a lot of kilometres. But being spread across the country from Brisbane to Perth, we were able to negotiate until we had a shortlist of about twenty stories.

At that point, Stephen had us list our ten favourites, and promised us that each of the list-toppers would be included. (Except for Stephen, we read 'blind', so none of us knew who'd written what until the final list was in place.) We breathed a sigh of relief to find that our lists were not as different from each other as we'd feared, and I was delighted that one reader put my story, 'La Belle Dame', at the top of her list!

'La Belle Dame' has a long history. I first wrote it back in about 2005 for submission to an anthology that never went ahead. That's not an uncommon occurrence, so I just sighed and put my handiwork away. Every now and then, I would take it out, edit it again and send if off to a possible market, but while it always got shortlisted, it never made the final cut.

Then last year, I decided to enter it for the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre SF award. This is a well-respected competition, many of whose winners have gone on to become successful in the profession. I um-ed and ah-ed a bit, because I'd always felt there was something not quite right about 'La Belle Dame', but couldn't put my finger on what it was.

Finally, I showed it to a well-published friend, and she made a suggestion for the ending that I thought was a good idea but felt I wasn't skilled enough to do. 'Give it a try,' my friend advised, and to my surprise it wasn't as hard as I'd thought. I was delighted when 'La Belle Dame' was selected from a field of about 120 stories for the award's shortlist of eight. But again, no banana.

So I only offered it for the Specusphere's anthology somewhat diffidently, during that early phase when entries were slow and I thought maybe we'd have trouble making up the numbers. You can imagine how delighted I was when one of the readers actually preferred it to all the others! So at last 'La Belle Dame' (a take on the Keats poem, of course) has found a home. And a very nice home it is, nestled under a truly lovely cover designed by the Specusphere's graphic designer, Amanda Greenslade, and in the company of other lovely mythic tales, many of them by well-known and well-published authors.

So now it's getting exciting! Mythic Resonance goes to press early in the new year. (Watch this space!) And yes, we are already talking about doing it again next year. A new anthology, with a different theme! I can already feel that enthusiasm coming on again...

Labels: Editing, La Belle Dame, Mythic Resonance, pulishing anthology, Specusphere |

4 comments

Monday, 3 October 2011

An editor's role

Monday, October 03, 2011 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

Recently, a friend sent me a link to an article in The Guardian by restaurant reviewer Giles Coren. My friend said that was exactly how he felt about his writing.

As fiction writers, we do feel very protective of our work. Our stories are like babies we have birthed and parented. We like to think they are perfect, and that not one word should be changed.

A few weeks in a good critiquing group, however, is usually enough to show writers that their work is not perfect and can be improved, but even so, there is always that flash of resentment when someone wants to alter one of their darlings. It can take a long time to wean that baby, and the process is painful for the parent!

But we're talking here not about fiction but about writing for journals, and in that light I think Coren’s tirade is sheer wankery. As an editor, I feel I should put the other side of the story forward.

For a start, Coren is not writing the Great British Novel. He is writing ephemera. Writing that goes into a newspaper, journal or online zine is always edited without consultation – it's just the way it's done, because of tight deadlines. And for any writer to be so precious as to be highly offended at the removal of an indefinite article is just laughable.

Nobody likes having their work altered, and I agree that sometimes sub-editing is done less than skilfully, simply because there is a deadline to meet. The worst instance of this in my experience happened when I faxed off a review to the Australian and the next morning received the phone-message equivalent of a poison-pen letter from the artist concerned, complaining bitterly about the "mean-spirited review". I found out why when I opened the paper – my review had been cut in half, and only the negative criticisms made it into print. (I only got paid for the part that was published, too, but that’s the way the system works.)

This episode was largely my fault. The golden rule of criticism is "put the good stuff first", and for some reason, on this occasion, I did not. All the good stuff was at the bottom of the article – the part that got sliced “on the stone” as they used to say in those pre-electronic days, probably to make room for a last minute ad or "stop press" paragraph. Mea culpa, mea culpa – but it taught me never to break that rule again.

As I understand it, when a sub removes a small word, it's usually because leaving it in would result in a "widow" on the next line. Apart from wasting valuable space in a print journal, orphans and widows are anathema to layout people. One sorry little word sitting on its own, looking lost, can spoil the whole look of a page. Because, you see, a layout person is, in his or her own way, also an artist, one with different sensibilities. The rhythm of reading the work out loud means little to the layout person, I fear. And in any case, who reads the bloody newspaper out loud, for heaven's sake?

(A “widow” BTW, is a word or phrase that hangs out on its own at the top of a page or column, while an “orphan” is a word or phrase – usually a heading of some kind – that is left alone on the bottom of a page of column. It does depend, though on whose definition you read!)

But all that I've just said only applies to writing for ephemera. Fiction writing, of course, is a different matter. There, ongoing consultation is the norm, to-ing and fro-ing until the work is satisfactory to both writer and editor – within a given deadline, of course. And in fiction, the writer has the last say – but the editor has right of veto, if not on that work, then the next. A writer who stets every tiny word and every comma will pretty soon find herself without anyone to publish her work. Word of such things gets around.

One only has to look at the morass of badly-written, unedited, self-published works on the market to see that the editor, whether of journals or books, performs an essential task in bringing the reader a product that delivers value for money. And that, friends, is the bottom line in any industry, even an arts-based one. Perhaps especially in an arts-based one, because all performers, all visual artists, all writers, are competing for that same tiny slice of people's purses, and if we produce a sub-standard product it will not sell. The fact that we editors hurt people's feelings now and then must be balanced against the fact that we help many, many others to create a better product. For, make no mistake, a writer's work is a product. It may also be a work of art, but only history can judge that.

An editor is to a writer what a choreographer is to a dancer, or a conductor is to an orchestra. If you're a fiction writer, try to be grateful to your editor for helping you to produce something that really shines, something more people will want to read!

And if you're a reviewer or a feature writer, for God’s sake just smile and take the money.

Labels: Editing, writing |

9 comments

Wednesday, 28 July 2010

Once I thought I'd like to be an editor

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

Here's another post recycled from my old WordPress blog.

As I wrote the title to this post, I thought it sounded vaguely familiar. Then I remembered a silly little song my father taught me when I was five years old, which began, “Once I thought I’d like to be a cricketer”. I can still remember the words, so just for fun I put them up here.

But this post is not about cricketers, but editors. How does one become an editor?

I suppose it’s not unlike the way one becomes a cricketer or anything else: you watch other people doing it, then maybe you get someone to teach you a few things, and from then on its practice, practice, practice. That’s certainly the way I learnt, but that was twenty years ago. Things are a bit different now, in that there are tertiary courses devoted to editing and publishing and the Institute of Professional Editors has set up a qualifying examination. But a lot of people, even today, just fall into it, as I did.

I was at Edith Cowan University and had just started to write for Music Maker Magazine, in which I had my own column. Fellow students, therefore, thought I might be some kind of expert and they would often ask me to check their work for spelling and grammatical errors before they passed it in. I soon realised I was, in fact, not bad at copyediting. After all, I come from a generation that had the Rules drummed into them from an early age. It horrified me a bit to realise that in my French classes there were young people fresh out of school who literally did not know a noun from a verb. The lecturer was in despair. ‘How can I teach them French grammar,’ she asked, ‘when they don’t even know the rules in English?’ I sympathised completely, and I felt sorry for the students, who had never had chance to learn the beautiful intricacies of our language.

If our own young people cannot understand English grammar, what hope does a foreigner have? So when a few years later a student from Nepal asked me to help him learn to speak and write better English, I was happy to help. Jaganath (who has since become a friend) somehow persuaded his university that they should pay for his English lessons. The university responded by sending me more students, and it didn’t take me long to realise that they didn’t want conversation practice nearly as much as they wanted help with their assignments.

In some countries, styles of writing differ considerably from the linear point-to-point-to-conclusion logic that we are used to in English. Rather, scholars there prefer a rather more circuitous approach. This difference puzzles a lot of students for whom English is not their mother tongue.

What’s more, academic English, especially in the sciences, still prefers a formal style with a preponderance of Latinate words rather than plain Saxon-based ones. Formal written English is almost a different language. Naturally, lot of students, not all of them foreign, find this really confusing. Formal English uses Latinate words for historical reasons – after the Norman invasion of 1066, the ruling classes, who made and enforced the laws, for several centuries did not speak the same language as the predominately Anglo-Celtic people they had conquered. When I explain this to students it’s a joy to see comprehension dawn in their eyes, and some of them get the hang of the different “feel” of the two forms of English very quickly.

And so it was that I fell into editing quite by chance. As more and more students were awarded their degrees, so my confidence grew. By this time I had become interested in writing fiction, and other writers would ask me to critique their work. At first, I would only copyedit their offerings, but here, too, I gradually became bolder and more confident and as my expertise grew I took on more and more complex editing jobs and felt I could charge a reasonable fee for my work.

If you feel drawn to editing and would like to learn more, find your state’s society of editors (There’s a list on the Society of Editors WA website.) If you live outside Australia, try an internet search for society+editors+Antarctica, or whatever other country you live in. The internet is full of wonders and you’re sure to turn up something!

Of course, if you’re young enough to want to make this your career, you can enrol in a formal course either in journalism or editing and publishing. But a lot of freelance editors are older people like me, who learnt formal English in school and who may have some journalistic or teaching experience; who have read widely and taken appropriate workshops when they’ve had the opportunity, and who are willing to go on learning.

There’s room for all kinds of editors. Few freelancers make a full living from their editing activities, but that’s not a bad thing. Many people today depend on a portfolio of skills for their livelihood . If you love language and enjoy helping people, why not make editing one of yours?

Labels: autobiography, Editing, writing |

0 comments

Sunday, 25 July 2010

Authorial voice, passive writing and the passive voice

Sunday, July 25, 2010 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

How do you like my new-look blog? Kudos to my clever son Scott over at ManeyActs.

I've decided to import some old posts from the WordPress blog that I no longer use, and as Blogger won't let me import the lot in date order, I shall copy and paste them one by one. Here's one I posted in March of this year:

On sites that offer writing advice one sometimes reads instruction that confuses “passive writing” with “passive voice”. We see this among critiquers in writing groups as well, and it’s a source not just of confusion but also of misinformation.

I think there are two sources for this confusion. We often read that a writer needs to develop his or her own “Voice”. (I’ll capitalise this hereafter, to distinguish it from the other meaning of the word, which I’ll deal with farther down.)

“Voice” in this context really refers to those distinctive elements of a writer’s style that remind us of who is writing. If we look at authors of bygone days, Voice is not hard to see. Charles Dickens, for instance, had a distinctive Voice. So did Rudyard Kipling and DH Lawrence. In fact, pick up a work by any well-known author active before about 1980 and if you’ve read a few of that author’s books you will probably recognise the Voice straight away, because it did not vary much from book to book within that author’s oeuvre.

Few authors today have that kind of truly distinctive Voice. This is, I think, because of the popularity of the so-called “deep third” (AKA tight third or close third) Point-of-View (POV). It is currently fashionable for authors to hide behind their characters, giving the reader a seamless experience in which the author almost “channels” the POV character. In speculative fiction, two authors who demonstrate remarkable mastery of the deep third are Joe Abercrombie and Margo Lanagan. It is easy to lose oneself in their characters; to feel the character’s sensations and emotions and even to feel as if one is thinking that character’s thoughts. The author’s Voice and the voice of the POV character become one.

Some other authors use the close third only for moments of high tension and drama, retaining their own voice for narrative passages. Guy Gavriel Kay’s work is largely written in this style.

That more obvious, capital-V voice found in authors of past decades is easily confused with another sense of voice – passive writing. If a writer employs a lot of unnecessary auxiliary verbs (forms of “to be” and “to have” as part of an action, such as “He was running”) and constantly uses weak verbs such as walk and go (or went) people say the writing is passive. It’s only a short step from here to thinking that the writer has a “passive” Voice, and here’s where the trouble really starts, because the expression “passive voice” has a clearly defined grammatical meaning.

The “passive voice” as opposed to the “active voice” means using a verb without close reference to the doer of the action, as in, for example, “The ball was thrown by John” instead of “John threw the ball”. The giveaway is that little word “by”. A verb in the passive voice is followed by a preposition, most commonly “by” or “to” (as in “The award was given to Jenny”).

Let's look at examples of the three matters under discussion here – authorial voice, passive writing and the passive voice:

1. An author’s voice (I'll stop capitalising it now you 've got the picture!)
Here is Dickens’s famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The opening gives us an excellent feel for Dickens’s very distinctive (authorial) voice.

2. Passive writing
Here’s a passage I’ve just made up:

I was walking along the road, having just been to the dentist, when I was hit from behind by a cricket ball that had been thrown by a schoolboy. I had been intending to go to visit my mother, but the blow to my head gave me such a migraine that I found myself thinking that perhaps I should be going straight home to lie down.

That is passive writing. We don’t get any feel for the action or for the character’s feelings and sensations because we are separated from them by wases and –ing words – and one example of the passive voice! Can you see where it is?

3. The passive voice
Yup, that’s right: “I was hit from behind by a cricket ball” is in the passive voice, grammatically speaking. The passive voice is best avoided in fiction writing because it is frequently found as an element of passive writing.

But don’t get the terms mixed up. Passive writing is not always in the passive voice. Passive writing, as I’ve said above, is characterised by too many auxiliary verbs, weak verbs and probably weak nouns as well. It may or may not include use of the passive voice.

And not all writing that uses auxiliary verbs is passive, either. For instance “The pretty girl was dancing when I first saw her” uses the auxiliary “was” to indicate the past continuous tense. Some critiquers might try to persuade you to replace it with the simple past – “The pretty girl danced when I first saw her”. They would be wrong, because the simple past tense in that case would be incorrect and somewhat ambiguous. It might suggest, for example, that the pretty girl started to dance because I saw her!

What I’m trying to get across here is don't confuse authorial voice with the passive voice and especially don't confuse passive writing with the passive voice. “The pretty girl was dancing when I first saw her”, and, for instance, “The pretty girl will be dancing next time I see her” are certainly not in the passive voice, and, used correctly, are not necessarily examples of passive writing, either. They are perfectly legitimate uses of continuous forms of the verb “to dance”.

We are fortunate in having so many ways to express things in English, and the continuous tenses have their place. The skill lies in knowing when you can get away without using them, rather than making blanket statements about "passive writing" or worse, confusing them with the passive voice.

Labels: craft of writing, Editing, narrative voice |

2 comments

Sunday, 27 December 2009

Writers need editors!

Sunday, December 27, 2009 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

I have just added a post to the Egoboo blog on the topic of why a writer should engage an editor. Click your way across – and while you’re there, read some of the other recent excellent posts too, including Sarah Parker’s contribution on how to use Wordle to identify overused words in your writing.

Labels: Editing, Egoboo |

2 comments

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Multiculturalism and genealogy

Sunday, November 15, 2009 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

Yesterday, on my way by public transport to an editing workshop, I had three experiences within fifteen minutes that showed me how much Australia has changed since I arrived here in 1952 at the age of eight. In those days, you could buy two kinds of cheese in Australia: mild and tasty. Well, three, if you counted the processed stuff that came prepackaged and tasted like greasy cardboard. Not that I've eaten greasy cardboard, mind you, but I'd imagine the taste and the nutritional value would not have been much different. These days, we can buy delicacies from all over the world, in many different varieties, and I thank heaven for that because I absolutely adore cheese, and being a vegetarian, I eat a lot of it.

It was a two hour journey each way to attend a three-hour workshop. It's a good thing it was such a good workshop, or I would have been a bit grumpy by the time I got home, but in fact it was excellent, thanks to Amanda Curtin, the leader. She made me think hard about some of the techniques I'd been using and how to improve their worth in my work. But there was added value to the outing. In fact, the interesting experiences started before I'd even boarded the first bus.

As I waited for the bus to arrive, a young man crossed the road and began to read the timetable on display at the stop. He looked a bit bemused, so I asked where he was going. He told me, I gave him directions, and we got on talking. It turned out he was from Africa, had grown up in the UK, and had spent some time in Canada before coming to Australia. He had already found a job and was hoping to buy a car this week.

His accent was fascinating. It sounded North American. Sort of. Sort of English, too. I wondered if he still spoke his own African language but as it was almost time for the bus to arrive there was no chance to ask. I wished him luck in his car quest and took the bus to the railway station.

The station is close to a school that has a specialist dance stream, and waiting for the train were two young people. They looked slightly Asian, the boy more so than the girl. I would have guessed him to be Chinese. The pair must have been to a dance rehearsal, for the boy was practising steps he'd just learnt. I heard him tell the girl that he did not want to forget them. Over and over again he did the same sequence. I didn't like to stare, but from the corner of my eye I guessed he'd been learning a folk dance of some kind, quite possibly a Morris dance. The sight of a Chinese boy practising English Morris dancing on the platform of an Australian railway station was incongruous to the point of being surreal. It would have been impossible only a few years ago. When I was that age, few boys danced at all, there were hardly any Chinese people in Australia, and to my knowledge, absolutely no Morris dancing.

When the train arrived, we got in separate carriages. I wondered if he kept on practising during the train ride!

At the next station, two young women got on. They appeared to be Indian. One had the dark hair and eyes typical of the sub-continent, but the other, athough her features resembled those of her companion, had eyes of a lovely shade of dove grey. She had a dear little toddler in a stroller. His skin was considerably lighter than hers, but he had the same deep brown eyes and dark curls as the other woman. At a guess, I'd say maybe his father was southern European, or perhaps half Indian.

This is not only Australia today: it is the world today. These three brief encounters led me to consider the problems inherent in researching the family trees of the children of this multi-cultural generation. I have blogged my thoughts over on my website blog. If you're interested in family history, please do check it out.

Labels: Editing, famhist |

7 comments

Popular pages

About Me

My books

Buy The Talismans

The Dagger of Dresnia

The Cloak of Challiver, Book two of The Talismans

Mythic Resonance

Mythic Resonance

Follow me on Twitter

Share a link on Twitter

For Readers, Writers & Editors

Interviews with authors

My Blog List

Favourite Sites

Blog Archive

Places I've lived: Manchester, UK

Places I've lived: Gippsland, Australia

Places I've lived: Geelong, Australia

Places I've lived: Tamworth, NSW

Places I've Lived - Sydney

Places I've lived: Auckland, NZ

Places I've Lived: Mount Gambier

Places I've lived: Adelaide, SA

Places I've Lived: Perth by Day

Places I've lived: High View, WV

Places I've lived: Lynton, Devon, UK

Places I've lived: Braemar, Scotland

Places I've lived: Barre, MA, USA

Places I've Lived: Perth by Night

Inner Peace Blog

Versatile Blogger Award

Fabulous Blog Award

Search This Blog

Some reviews of The Dagger of Dresnia

Followers