I’d love to hear your opinions and ideas, please!

This time, I’ve followed the recommended approach of creating characters and an outline and synopsis before starting to write, but still the blank pages are taunting me. .

I was dubious. I have paid cover designers before and been deeply dissatisfied. They typically charge high rates - often over a thousand dollars. And they don’t read the book before conceiving a design.

Sometimes miracles happen,, though…

The writer always misses errors. The human brain plays weird tricks on us at times, and one of the tricks it plays is to read something we wrote as we intended to write it - not as it is actually written. You can look at a misspelled word a dozen times, stare at it for ages, and it will persist in appearing to be spelled correctly. You see the letters that should make up the word in precisely the order they should be arranged, despite the error being one that would jump off the page when readers read. So…

My third novel was given the working title The Inheritance simply because that’s what it was all about: the inheritance. But when I sought critiques on the proposed cover design, a helpful fellow author remarked that The Inheritance was a work by a very well known author,

Titles do matter. The title is the book’s first impression. It can suggest the genre and tone. It can set reader expectations. Unique titles help books stand out, and hopefully make the work memorable. I believe A Will of Deceit suggests the genre and tone effectively - much more so than The Inheritance would have. I can only hope A Will of Deceit proves to be as memorable as it is apparently unique, and that it appeals. Readers, please comment!

And I, always worried about what other people think posted the suggested design on a Facebook cover critique group page. The criticisms can thick and fast, so the cover dilemma continues! What will this book eventually look like?

A writer an agonise, for hours, over a single word. And on this date, I did.

What the heck is one of those? (This is 1979, remember!)

I phoned and asked for instructions on how to apply.

“Interview Friday afternoon 5pm,” the receptionist replied. Just like that. No formal application. No anxious wait for a response. No questions about qualifications. Just turn up on Friday afternoon. What a terrible time for an interview, though!

….

I got that job. I learned to use that machine, and so began my love affair with computers.

This machine was the beginning of a new era for authors, and one that would pave the way for many who could only ever yearn to write a novel to fulfil their wildest dream.