One of my children has a specific language impairment. Watching him read is painful. He's never been able to relax, and the level of concentration required is about as much as it would take me to understand a page of calculations in an astrophysicists notebook. Worse, he lives with a family of bibliophiles. All of us love it, or more to the point find it EASY. He loves stories too, and always has...
Sunday, 28 January 2018
Thursday, 25 January 2018
Word Count Goals, MS WORD Version
Here’s a trick for writers who need a bit of word count motivation to keep them inspired.
In Microsoft Word, I like to display my current word count, the percentage of my final word count that I’ve completed, and how many words I have left to write. It stares at me from the header and 'inspires' me...
Wednesday, 10 January 2018
Birnbeck Pier
Creepy abandoned buildings are one of my top sources of inspiration for new novels, so I thought I'd share one of my current favourites here.
At the entrance to Birnbeck Pier, a sign reads 'Death lies this way' which, if you ask me, sounds more like a challenge than a warning. Crumbling buildings,...
Tiny - The Invisible World of Microbes
Today's science for kids book recommendation is 'Tiny - The Invisible World of Microbes' by Nicola Davies and illustrated by Emily Sutton. The drawings are just lovely and illustrate the wonders of the microbial world perfectly. I've bought it for my 3 year old in the hope that one day in the distant...
Hidden Universes
I grew up staring out at the stars through my parents’ antique telescopes; marvelling at the tiny pinpricks of twinkling light and how, on a clear night, the Milky Way streaked across the sky. There are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and more than 1,000 billion galaxies in the universe....