CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Earlier I talked about setting up a daily blog. Let's assume that you have followed the advice given and that you have a blog. You’re writing material and getting daily items posted.   What happens next?   The truth is that a blog post, sitting out in cyberspace alone, is not likely to attract much attention. As I explained earlier, a daily blog post in itself will not particularly serve to attract a public. All your hard work, and the fact that you haven’t missed a day for m

So you want to write a blog, maybe every day, and get you and what you do known across the world instantly?   Blogging sounds like a really fabulous idea. All you have to do is write content directly into the internet and soon you’ll have a vast following and a channel to so many people with whom you can be friends or out of whom you can make customers. What’s so hard about that?   The internet is indeed a wonderful thing and it has empowered individuals in ways never before

A good place to begin when looking at the effects that a story is having on you as a reader is to understand the four basic genres of storytelling. These are Epic (which contains the vast majority of fiction created by the human race, with its generally happy endings), Tragedy (a fall from grace, ending in death), Irony (a twisted version of an Epic, in which usual expectations are turned on their heads) and Comedy (which usually ends with a marriage or reunion of some kind).

Have you ever experienced the phenomenon whereby you are rolling along, doing what you are doing with a clean heart and a good intention, and then suddenly (and it’s usually sudden and unexpected) someone comes along and brutally attacks you for no apparent reason, verbally accusing you of all kinds of crimes which have never entered your head, let alone made it through you into any sort of action?   It can knock you for six (as we say in England), can’t it?   Sometimes an at

In an earlier article , we examined how Steven Carr, as a master of Irony, often tends to mesmerise the reader into a false sense of security, subverting it with an unexpected ending. This is one of the features of Irony as one of the four basic genres, the other genres being Epic (where the bulk of fiction has its home), Tragedy and Comedy - Irony ‘tricks’ the reader and usually leaves him or her feeling introverted, lost, thoughtful or even depressed. But there are other fe

Many writers do not consider themselves to be salespeople and have considerable back-off on the areas of marketing and selling their work, once done. This means that, in many cases, they put together completed books and are then totally stumped about what to do next.   The truth is, for writers, that marketing and selling is built into their product in a way which it just isn’t for something like a toaster or a piece of home insurance.   As a writer, you get to market all the

Wandering into the site of Fountains Abbey through a lesser-used entrance, one could be forgiven for thinking that Fountains Hall, the Jacobean manor house near that entrance, was one’s destination. It’s a grand place, used by storytellers as a setting, including for the final scenes to the film Omen III: The Final Conflict  in 1980, as well as the film version of The Secret Garden . It also has some untold supernatural stories: years ago, when the best route into the hall w

I live quite close to Haworth, the famous home village of the Brontë family. The way the wind howls in straight off the moors to strike the walls of my house, the first house for thirty miles of open moorland, reminds me very much of the most famous work of Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848), her only novel, Wuthering Heights . Emily was the third-eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell, and wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell.