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…The torchbearers hurriedly re-lit the torches of Dun Culhwch.
“Why, a veritable master of all the crafts we have here, it would seem,” said Big Chief Hawthorn, “but let a seat be brought for this man who has asked for my daughter’s hand that I might consider him the more keenly.”
Continue reading at France & Vincent
Welcome to this week’s writephoto prompt.
You can find all last week’s entries in the weekly round-up, which was published earlier today.
Throughout the week, I will feature as many of the responses here on the Daily Echo as time and space allows, usually in the order in which they are submitted. Please be aware that I tend to schedule reblogs in advance and these spaces fill quickly so an early submission is more likely to be reblogged.
All posts will be featured in the weekly round-up on Thursday, 13th February at 10am GMT, linking back to the original posts of contributors.
Use the image below as inspiration to create a post on your own blog… poetry, prose, humour… light or dark, whatever you choose, as long as it is fairly family-friendly.
Submit your link by noon (GMT) Wednesday 12th February.
Link back to this post with a pingback (Hugh has an excellent tutorial here) and/or leave a link in the comments below, to be included in the round-up.
Use the #writephoto hashtag in your title so your posts can be found.
There is no word limit and no style requirements, except that your post must take inspiration from the image and/or the prompt word in the title of the post.
Feel free to use #writephoto logo or include the prompt photo in your post if you wish, or you may replace it with one of your own to illustrate your work.
By participating in the #writephoto challenge, please be aware that your post may be featured as a reblog on this blog and I will link to your post for the round-up each week.
Regular contributors are also welcome to come over as my guest and introduce themselves (click here for details).
Please note: As I do not share my political opinions on this blog, please do not use the challenge as a platform from which to share yours. Party political or racially offensive posts will not be reblogged.
This week’s prompt ~ Choice
For visually challenged writers, the image shows a winter landscape, with trees by a stream and rough stepping stones across it.
The photo for this week’s prompt was taken one wintry morning, walking the dog. It is mornings like these that make waking so early a pleasure.
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Thank you to everyone who took part, visited or reblogged the posts or left comments for their authors.
A new prompt will be published later today. As always, I will reblog as many contributions as space and time allows as they come in… and all of them will be featured in the round-up next Thursday.
All the posts are listed below, so please click on the links below to read them and leave a comment for the author!
Pingbacks do not always come through… if you have written a post for this challenge and it does not appear in the round-up, please leave a link to your post in the comments and I will add it to the list.
An invitation to writephoto writers…
As there are usually too many contributions to reblog all of them every week, and so that we can get to know their writers, I would like to invite all writephoto writers to come and introduce themselves on the blog as my guest! Click here for details.
Come and join in!
Thank you to all Contributors!
Please click the links to read and comment on the author’s site.
Emily Karn at Musings of a Soul Eclectic
Observations of The Urban Spaceman
Vandana Bhasin at My Feelings My Freedom
Helen Jones of Journey to Ambeth
Roberta Eaton at Roberta Writes
Balroop Singh at Emotional Shadows
Christine Bolton at Poetry for Healing
Catherine at Writer of Fantasy & Fiction
Nascent Ederren at The Ederren
Anita from Anita Dawes and Jaye Marie
Diana Wallace Peach at Myths of the Mirror
Brian F Kirkham at The Inkwell
Ritu Bhathal at But I Smile Anyway
Jules at Jules Pens Some Gems…
Paula Light at Light Motifs II
Deborah at A Wise Woman’s Journey
Daisybala at freshdaisiesdotme
Craig Towsley at A Bunch of Dumb Words in a Row
Christine Bialczak at Stine Writing
Keith Hillman at Keith’s Ramblings
Trent P. McDonald at Trent’s World
Honoré Dupuis at Of Glass and Paper
Goff James at Art, Photography and Poetry
The book stuffed with bookmarks on my bedside table is a really good one. Written by a highly respected, world-renowned author in his field who, disillusioned with mainstream publishers, has decided to go down the self-publishing route. Reading this book is an interesting experience… for several reasons… and not all of them good.
It is a gem of a book… full of information, snippets of knowledge pertinent to our own ongoing adventures and references that have already dragged me out of bed to get straight into the research. I would highly recommend it… except, I don’t want to associate my next remarks with either title or author… as a book, it deserves better.
The cover and title are great… attention-grabbing, if a tad misleading. They hook you with the implied promise of something that is barely included between the covers.
The content, though, is superb…The layout is clean and attractive, the illustrations pertinent and fully explained in the text.
But… and it is a huge but… there seems to have been no attempt at all to edit, proof or correct the errors in the text.
I am not talking about the odd elusive typo or errant comma here. There are very few books, even those published by the Big Publishers, that manage to go end to end without some minor error or oversight. It happens. Either at the editing, proofing or typesetting stage. At best, there are always those clunky phrases that could have been polished. Writers are human.
No, I am talking here about masses of typos, misspelled or repeated words or whole words missed out altogether. I don’t think I have found a page without several errors… And don’t get me started on the punctuation…
The book reads as if it was written as a ‘stream of consciousness’ piece and, as such, it has a freshness and immediacy that is both exciting and engaging. Unfortunately, it would seem that the writer left it that way, without even a cursory check and ignoring anything flagged up by the most basic word processing programme.
I’ve just finished the first pass of editing and proofing a book, so, to be fair, I am probably still reading in edit mode, but some of these errors are so glaring that there is little excuse. Or maybe, after having just individually checked over seven hundred apostrophes, I am being too critical…
But the point I want to make is that even though I may have noticed every error, it did not spoil my enjoyment of the book. Nor, judging by its many and excellent reviews, has it marred the experience for other readers. I loved it, learned a lot and will undoubtedly read it again. The content is worth far more than the errors.
As indie writers we do, I believe, have a responsibility to make sure that the books we publish are as well presented as possible. For many of us, though, no matter how much we believe in our work, we simply cannot afford to outsource the tasks like editing, design or the creation of cover art. So we do it ourselves and learn as we go.
No matter how carefully you self-edit, you will inevitably find an error on the first read after it has been published. Even if you played it safe and pored through a proof copy. But, although that misplaced comma or appalling typo may seem like the end of the world, all is not lost.
Most readers will forgive the odd error. The brain fills in gaps and perception often corrects as you read. Most errors won’t even be noticed, except by the author. Especially if you are caught up in the narrative.
If, as the writer, an error really bugs you… and if you publish via KDP… you can always correct the manuscript and re-upload it. For ebooks, that is fairly well-known. But you can do the same with print books too, as long as the error is a minor one.
Or, you can do what we are doing… with several years and a bookshelf of experience and learning behind us… and republish from scratch.
Fresh eyes, fresh edit, updated design and newly created covers.
But no matter how carefully we peer at words, commas and apostrophes to get the second edition right, I can almost guarantee that something will slip through the net. Because the problem is that writers too get caught up in the story…
Cia’s first appearance began there —> Thursday photo prompt: Chill #writephoto
Cia awakens just before daybreak. The snow has started to melt away. She listens for movement of those coming out of hibernation. She steps out of the cave to watch the sun greet the earth. The warmth felt great. Loneliness crept up on her once again as she thought about her family. The winter was long and she starved for more than food.
Continue reading at Writer of Fantasy & Fiction
Chill mists shroud the sun
Winter wears a crystal gown
Songbirds are silent
Reblogged from Life in the Realm of Fantasy:
People often say they want to write a book. I used to say that too.
In 1985 I came across my first stumbling block on my path to becoming a writer. I didn’t know it, but to go from dreamer to storyteller is easy. Anyone can do it.
But if we choose to become an author, we’re taking a walk through an unknown landscape.
And the place where we go from dreamer to storyteller to author is the hardest part.
At first the path is gentle and easy to walk. As children, we invent stories and tell them to ourselves. As adults, we daydream about the stories we want to read, and we tell them to ourselves.
That part of the walk is easy. At some point, we become brave enough to sit down and put the story on paper.
The blank screen or paper is like an empty pond. All we have to do is add words, and the story will tell itself.
Continue reading at Life in the Realm of Fantasy
A sky of emerald green has sat upon me since my youth. The trees as are countless walls to rooms without an end within the deepest woods of my youth, the sky appearing subtly behind leaves of green or golden red.
And when the winter comes the sky is white and the trees all grey and black, as though a cold flame had touched them in the night to render their branches bare.
It had been so in all my youth and all my younger days, living in the shadow of such giant trees which ripped at all the clouds. I had thought the world knew this as all there could ever be, until the day I went too far to stumble across some fields.
Continue reading at The Ederren
It would have been difficult to foresee the full social effects of the internet. It is now apparent that our lives have been changed, forever, in ways that are simultaneously warped and wonderful.
Being socially and politically aware was difficult enough in a pre-online world. In this new, ‘wired’ age, where perceived connections of opinion are shared across social media, the intersection of money, politics and psychological manipulation has created an entirely new ‘world’ in which groups of people live immersed in opinion which they believe to be shared by the majority of that world.
To my mind, a powerful way of visualising this is as a cafe, where we may drop in at any time of the world’s day and night. It never closes, though we may experience peak response determined by the physical location (otherwise irrelevant) of…
A wonderfully warm post from Jennie.
I have a handwritten list of posts I want to write, things that are important. There is one that has been screaming at me for a long time, with yellow highlighter and a post-it note: “The Hundred Little Things.” It is the source of all that’s important, why everything we do is meaningful, whether we know it or not. It is the most important thing I learned in teaching. Oh boy, did I learn this.
A past parent visited me at school this week. Her boys are beyond college and doing well. She wanted to stop by, give me a Peter Rabbit cookie jar, and say thank you. Like the student alumni who stop by and cannot pinpoint what it is they remember, she was the same way. And I know why. It’s the hundred little things.
Do I remember everything I did with Adam? No. Does his Mom? No. …
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