Once again another gap between blogs. No excuse, but then I don’t have a great deal to say at the moment. I have been brushing up on my Scrivener project. This is a writer’s work tool to help in the building of a manuscript. It’s extremely useful and popular with a lot of writers. I’ve just about worked my way through the course, but have promised myself to go through it again. It’s not a long course, and the project is loaned on trial for thirty days. That’s thirty days that are not necessarily consecutive. Theoretically you could download one page a year for thirty years; not that it would be much help. I will purchase it once I have grasped its finer detail and got used to the way it which it functions. It isn’t expensive either. I plan to read through my manuscript from the beginning and use that to get my thought process back on track with the story line, and to build it with Scrivener. I can see Christmas interfering with my plan, but I do intend to try.

Next week, December 1st. I plan to visit the Chindi writers group. This is a group of local authors who meet in Chichester once a month. Their aim is to help fellow writers in the group in any way they can with promotion and marketing ideas, and generally to encourage each other in their work. I’ve looked at the group’s writers on the web links and can see that they are all similar to me in that they are ‘indie’ authors and all have respectable reviews. I’m looking forward to it

I have received a couple of five star reviews for The Eagle’s Covenant, which I hope will give it a kick start. When I removed it from Acclaimed Books and published it myself on Amazon, I lost all the reviews. It has been a pain trying to build it up again, so hopefully the five star reviews will be a great help.

Coming towards the end of 2014 will see me (and Pat) regarding the year as one of the most traumatic in our lives. I battled chemotherapy and the subsequent problems associated with that. We sold our house and moved into rented accommodation in Spain, and then moved to England where we are happily settling into life here and enjoying every minute of it. I will be having my next session of treatment, my first in UK, at the local hospital in Chichester tomorrow, and this will continue for another eighteen months. I’m looking forward to 2015 and the hope that my progress, both in my health and my writing will be upward, fruitful and positive. I have a marketing idea for my books which I hope to have ready before Christmas, and will explain more once I have it up and running. I have my December 8th promotion coming up and the hope that this will boost my rankings. Let’s hope so. Wish me luck!