Open doors, boxes, libraries and avoiding the road to hell

'The road to hell is paved with adverbs'

Stephen King

My first action this week for

Operation Author: 365 Actions to Becoming  A Successful Author

Is that I am re-reading 'On Writing' Stephen King's memoir of the craft. It's one of those books that every writer should read, at least once and preferably several times at different points in their careers. It grounds you and forces you to reflect on your writing practice.

It is also a useful book to be reading while you are in that all important copy editing stage of your latest work.

My second action this week has been to go through the latest proof of Solomon's Secrets and do my final re-writes, based on the feedback from the editorial report. 


My third action has been starting to formulate my plans for my launch event. I've decided on the ideal date, I now have to find a venue. I put a few enquiries out this week, so far without success but I have some more places in mind. 

I also got a bit carried away in the SS Great Britain gift shop and bought 3 miniature versions of the box I bought in Bulgaria. The plan is to put some keys in these and leave them in 3 locations that participants must follow clues to find.

I went to a couple of Bristol Doors Open day events at the weekend.

The coolest was doing the behind the scenes tour of the Brunel Institute at the SS Great Britain.This action, my fourth action, was the most fascinating to me.

I had no idea they did such amazing work there. They have a library of antique books and a team of specialists who curate, maintain and restore old texts and artefacts with a maritime, engineering or Brunel link. And, the best part, as long as you book in, it's open to the public.

This will be a great source of inspiration and research for my next book, with a working title of Gabriel's Game. 

In this book, one of the key characters is a rare book collector and the search for the manuscript continues.

I shall definitely go back for inspiration and to chat to some of the experts. I also requested a copy of a leaflet the Leather Conservation booklet on Caring for Books and Archives. One of the team at the institute emailed a copy to me.
Awesome!

My fifth action and the one I'm most pleased with this week, was my interview on Bristol urban radio station, Ujima.

Here it is, have a listen;

http://listen-again.ujimaradio.com/index.php?id=18635

I start talking 6:40 in.

Action number six was attending a writing critique group this week. We meet once a month in the King William pub and give each other feedback on work that we email out a few days before. I emailed out my short story 'Interview with an agent' that you can read in a July entry on this blog. It went down well and the other writers in the group liked the idea of interviewing a main character like this. But they all agreed that I could have gone further, and dug deeper into Tom Sheridan's psyche. I'll do some re-writes once I've finished with the final draft of Solomon's Secrets and re-post it here.

My seventh and final action this week is later today. I am going to a self publishing event at Foyles in Bristol, so I'll report back on that another time.