This and That

I always said I wouldn’t blog. It didn’t appeal to me at all. Now I’m addicted to it. I’m thinking up subjects for blogs when I should be thinking up stories (and finding it just as difficult).

And it’s not just thinking up subjects – what about all those terrific blogs out there waiting to be read?

Womag’s blog http://womagwriter.blogspot.com/ is a fantastic resource. I find myself going back there again and again checking on things which got me thinking . . .

When I first started to target magazines – don’t laugh – I used to sit with a magazine and having read all the stories in it, I would then count the words in each story and make a mark at each 100. This was the kind of research I could do with a sleeping baby slung over my shoulder!

I’d make note of how many characters and scenes and the settings. My magazines would end up with notes written all over them. When I wrote a story, I knew roughly how many handwritten words would fill a page in my notebook, but when the story was finished, I’d have to count them just to be sure.

I wrote everything longhand to start with, then I’d type a draft which I’d tweak and twiddle before typing up the final copy.

Thank goodness for guidelines that most if not all magazines produce these days. And Word with its word count and spell check. And thank goodness for Womag who does such a lot of the hard work for the rest of us!