
1. Sit in a car park, train or bus, waiting room or pub. Watch people. Change the characters and situations; exaggerate what they do – or how you imagine any two of them might interact. For Sci-Fi, move it a million years into the future and/or a million light years away.
2. Jot the idea down on a sheet of paper, mobile phone, beer mat, back of hand; and scan it on to the computer so you have a digital copy of a piece of paper.
3. Write it up in expanded form on Word, with all the settings, characters and conversations well sketched-out.
4. Go through it all, improving characters, filling in details of situations, punctuation, grammar, is the end good enough?
5. Read it again – do the characters ring true? Are they consistent? Believable? Does it make sense? Would you get it if new to it?
6. Print it out and re-read it.
7. Read it aloud.
8. Read it to a group of others (at a writers’ group, for example). We all critique each other’s, and it’s amazing what we’ve missed in any aspect (spelling, logic, grammar, punctuation, etc.).
9. Correct and improve.
10. Get proof-reader (my wife), plus A N Other to go through it.
11. WAIT a month or two for it to become faded in the memory, and start again at 5.
12. Add to others; assemble into book; load onto Kindle Direct Publishing and spend a month formatting and altering everything for paperback
13. Do same again for eBook.
14. Make a few posters for Facebook etc.
15. Press “Publish in three weeks” button.
16. Panic
17. Restart at 5, ad infinitum.
Simples!
Thus is "Go Girl" out this week on Amazon eBook, Kindle Unlimited and Paperback.
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