A million years ago (back at the turn of the century) when I was working as a research assistant at the University of New South Wales, one of my jobs was to write up the project findings into reports. I was sent with a tape recorder and notebook up the road to the Sydney Children’s … Continue reading Hearing the Voice of the Writer
Writing the first draft of a novel is a bit like having a baby...
While my novel has been inspired by real-life people, it is ultimately fiction and so all my characters needed new names when I began to write. A character’s name is so important, it is worn like an item of clothing that one cannot remove. It distinguishes you and discloses things about you, more than we … Continue reading A character by any other name
Things have been falling apart in our house lately. First the kitchen sink started leaking. Then the toilet started leaking. Then another toilet decided to stop flushing altogether, which instantly brings you back into the middle-ages and reaffirms your love affair with modern plumbing and disappearing bodily waste. So over the past few weeks I … Continue reading Snubbed by a Plumber
Today marks the launch of my fourth blog: Fundraising Mums. Actually, if I’m being honest there was that other anonymous blog I started a couple of years ago and then freaked out and stopped publishing. It’s still out there in the virtual world, gathering dust and confusing people. But Fundraising Mums is the first blog … Continue reading Starting a New Blog – Mistakes I am Not Making This Time
Faced with a list of tiresome chores and no writing mojo to be found anywhere, I decided to indulge in a little private time this morning. I did something we all do, but rarely admit to. I Googled myself. The first page was pretty much what I expected. My blogs shannonmeyerkort.com and Relentless came up, … Continue reading Why You Should Never Google Yourself
How to write a viral blog post from someone who scored a million clicks in a week | Shannon Meyerkort - Author
This is an issue I have been grappling with for a while: should I let other websites publish my posts on their site? What about SEO and duplicate content? Will Google freak out? Will readers get annoyed when they see the same post in multiple places? Will I be losing blog traffic? Will I be … Continue reading Should I Let Other People (Re)Publish my Posts?
Feast or famine. Flood or drought. Inspiration or desperation. Do these sound familiar to you? As writers, do you find that it’s all or nothing when it comes to your writing? People who have been reading my other blog Relentless over the years can see that I tend to write in spurts, and can either … Continue reading How to Unblock Bloggers Block
Sometimes all a writer has is their name. And sometimes they don’t even have that. Words are intangible. When you speak them, they do not last. They can be misheard, or forgotten, or misquoted. They can be claimed by someone else. When you write online as I do, it is easy for your words to … Continue reading A Writer By Any Other Name
