* Bestselling * Award Winning * Indie
I wish we could flow as oceans tide,
swelling with joy at our urge to unfurl.
I feel we should roll as planets turn,
dark days and seasons held level with light.
I sense we can grow as mountains rise
from stresses rock setting, solid and free.
I intend to go as children run,
arms wide, smile plunging, into full stop.
—
We've become a modern day menace, apparently. Spreading our laptops and smartphones across tables and sofa, turning our local Starbucks or Costa into an office.
Marketing professors Merlyn Griffiths, from the University of North Carolina, and Mary Gilly, from the University of California, claim in a new study, Dibs! Customer Territorial Behaviours, that we cause rows with other customers and
#GoCreative.
I'm a bit sceptical about brain training and #creativity. Brain training works best in getting you used to jumping through particular mental hoops and improving your ability to do a specific brain task. 
But creative thinking is different.
The brainwaves that distinguish creative leaps, great ideas and inspired thinking have been shown by neuroscience to be
Closing a week of posts about the launch of the Alliance of Independent Authors at London Book Fair, this (long) post offers:
[That's me in the photo on the right, getting a tad
[#ALLIA #writing] Maybe it's because I'm Irish but every book I've ever written has had a lot to say about freedom — even my very first publication, a nonfiction book with a small
feminist press in Dublin (Attic, now part of Cork University Press), called BodyMatters For Women.
That was a health and exercise book – the day job then was fitness instructor – but the most important chapters, for me, were those dealing with ways to break free of our society's messed-up messages about women's bodies.
From there to the book I'm working on now – a novel about
#writerwednesday.
I'm excited to be speaking about the Alliance next Friday at NOT The Oxford Literary Festival (NTOLF). 
This event was started two years ago by writer/performers who were frustrated by the high admission prices at the … yes…Oxford Literary Festival.
Frustrated too by the lack of representation at the festival of Oxford's brilliant underground and spoken-word scene.
As self-publishing's potential to bring underground and grassroots voices to their readers is one of my
Happy St Patricks Day! Living abroad as I do, I love this day when the whole world goes a little bit … Read more
One of the many interesting people I've met at The Red Vic, the B&B I'm staying in here in San Francisco, is Laurie Marshall, writer, educator, peace activist and artist. Laurie is instigator of The Singing Tree Art Project, aiming to unite divided young people through having them work on a shared mural, based around the concept of planet earth as the ‘singing tree' of the cosmos.
Her most
Just a quick note to say if you are thinking of reading Before The Fall, then today’s the day to … Read more
Sorry for the delay…. I got a little waylaid by all the activity around the Alliance of Independent Authors but … Read more
I'm rather excited to tell you that the indie author's website I've been talking about for so long is finally ready to take members. Yes, the only global nonprofit association for the self-publishing writer has arrived. 
We're so thrilled at the bright and brilliant advisors that have come on board, the brightest and most brilliant names in indie writer-publishing. Handpicked for their knowledge and expertise, they will provide our members with superb support and guidance.
There are a few more
I’m awake in the middle of the San Francisco night, maybe because my body’s still on London time, maybe because … Read more
I've just got the jacket for ‘Before The Fall' (the sequel to After The Rising) over from the designer, the rather wonderful Andrew Brown at Design For Writers. 
I couldn't wait to show it to you.
Andrew and I are hoping you'll like it as much as we do. I reckon he's excelled himself this time.
The book is going through final
So the first week of January is over. Are the new year's creative intentions beginning to flag?
It's understandable. Finishing a task is an event. An outcome. A visible achievement. But starting is just starting.
Take running a marathon or publishing a book. Crossing the finishing line, having a book launch: these are events. Life before looks different to life after.
Starting isn't like that. When you
We're all trained to notice the gap. Between what we have and what we want, between where we are and where we hope we're going, between the person we are and who we'd like to be.
That's where the new year's resolutions slip in, even though we know they don't work. Through that gap. That hollow feeling of not doing, having or being enough.
How about this for an