Elaina James

photo courtesy of Anita Chapman On Saturday I set off on my writer related travels again. This time to London, for NeetsMarketing's Social Media Course for Writers, run by the lovely Anita Chapman. It seems fitting that I met Anita through social media. After learning lots of useful tips from her NeetsMarketing blog  I invited her to be a guest on my blog back in March, and she wrote a fantastic post for me on Taking Twitter to the Next Level . We finally got to meet in person at the RNA conference in July and caught up with one another again at the HNS conference in September. But it was great to attend one of her courses and learn from her in person. Saturday's course covered twitter, facebook, instagram and blogging. Whilst I've been blogging and using social media for over a year it was amazing to discover there was still so much that I didn't know. Anita was full of handy tips that were like little light bulb moments, as I discovered there's a much easi...

When I began writing stories in the 80s, I was a classic pantser – I didn’t realise it at the time because I was barely eight years old, and to waffle on for pages and pages about the fairy at the bottom of the garden seemed appropriate. My mum would ooh and aah in all the right places, and my teacher would add a smiley face at the bottom of my page. Little did I know that they were lulling me into a false sense of security. The revelation of being either a pantser or plotter would only become known to me once I hit forty. I wrote blindly, hoping to get to the brutal end of my story with a suitable middle and a punchy beginning, but it never panned out. I would inevitably run out of steam, or my characters would become bored with their adventure. It was in 2013 when I was finally introduced to the joys of plotting. Eager to take part in my first NaNoWriMo contest (National Novel Writing Month – a contest to pen a 50,000 word novel in 30 days), I engaged in the forum discussions...

I just had to use the waxing and waning of the moon as the timeline for my novel, ‘A Jarful of Moondreams’… Last month, I enjoyed reading Jack Steele’s contribution to Elaina's blog. It was on visiting and choosing the right locations for a novel and I thought about how vital the setting of place and time are to any novel. I decided to carry on the theme of setting this month by writing about how I have shown the passage of time in my debut novel, ‘A Jarful of Moondreams’. I write contemporary fiction and my currently released novel is set in the present day, 2015 to be precise. When I was writing, I had a calendar out to track events from May to September but I just knew that my characters would feel happier if I used the waxing and waning of the moon as the timeline for my novel. This could be lots of fun when I got it right but, at times, it was a headache to track the moon calendar of 2015 and make sure that it was in synch with the events in the novel. Why did I d...

Today I welcome Jack Steele, author of 'Loose Cannon', to my blog... Bannister House Flats (where I grew up) Capturing the essence of a location in my novels has become somewhat of a mini-obsession. It has to be detailed enough to transport the reader into that place but at the same time allow the mind to fill in the gaps and maintain the flow of the story. I could make it up of course but for whatever reason there is the need for me to visit that location. In my novel ‘Loose Cannon’ I used a pub in Canary Wharf called ‘The Gun’. It has a room upstairs where Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton are said to have had their private meetings. They showed me around the pub so I could get a good feel for the place. The research gained from that one visit alone was enough to use in all of my future novels in the series. The compulsion to physically walk through the doors of a pub and enjoy a drink there….. is why I love research! Brick Lane (where a Mafia family m...

I have come to realise that my ambition of being a writer involves a lot of waiting. The frantic activity of typing like mad to get the submission in on time is offset by the weeks, if not months, of waiting to hear the results. Fortunately I’m a patient woman and don’t mind waiting for things. What I struggle with however are the overwhelming nerves that all this waiting creates. My solution is to distract myself with more writing, which means more busy activity of typing, more submissions and yep, you guessed it, more waiting. I think there may be a slight flaw in my plan…

When I taught full time, I used to write on weekends mostly, having marking and lesson preparation to do in the week, as well as the usual child rearing and running of a house. After writing The Chic Boutique on Baker Street, I decided to take the plunge and take a year off to write full time. Lots of time to write, I thought, the boys being at school 6 hours a day, plenty of time to do everything! How wrong I was! Looking back, I don't know how I ever fitted in a job as well as studying and everything else. I am getting to grips with everything now, so I thought I would share some tips I have picked up. NaNoWriMo: write a novel in a month. I fail this every year, but I did have a great start to my current WIP by taking part. 50,000 words in a month. Great support and encouragement, and well worth a go. Delegate: do you really need to do everything yourself? Could your other half do the bath time, or the tea once a week? An hour's worth of writing right there, run, hide, ge...

When Elaina kindly invited me to be her guest, I thought for a long time what to say. In the end I decide to focus on ORGANISATION . The thing an author most lacks is time. Look at some of the things an author has to do: 1) Before starting the novel, there’ll almost certainly be the need for research, which may be ongoing. Even contemporary novels usually need some research, although less than for an historical novel. 2) Actually write the novel. 3) Ideally, the ‘finished’ novel should be edited by the author before being sent to a critiquer/agent/publisher. 4) Marketing. If the world doesn’t know your novel’s out there, how will they find it? It doesn’t matter how big the author is (talking in terms of being well-known, not size!), almost everyone has to help with publicising their novel. This is ongoing and time-consuming, and may have to be done when one’s trying to write the next novel. 5) Real life. Families and friends expect a look in, too. With good organisation, you’ll m...

Thank you for inviting me to your blog today, Elaina! When you asked me to write a post about social media for writers, I tried to think of what might be useful to writers who have been using Twitter for a while, but who struggle to keep up with all those tweets in their timeline. It’s worth trying out the following to make life easier, and to save time. Setting up and Using Twitter Lists It can be difficult ploughing through all the tweets in your timeline to find the content you really want to see. If you set up Twitter lists for areas relating to your ‘brand’ (the subjects and themes in your books, as well as those you’re interested in); you can add a column for each list to Tweetdeck (my preference) or Hootsuite. It’s possible to set up private or public Twitter lists, and I always go for private because otherwise when you add someone to a list, they receive a notification. You don’t have to follow someone to add them to your lists. There are other people’s public list...