Year: 2017

Mystery review: ‘A Case of Murder in Mayfair’ by Clara Benson

This is the second in the spin-off series from the author’s Angela Marchmont series or murder mysteries set in the twenties. This time, Freddy Pilkington-Soames, insouciant man-about-town, finds himself in the middle of a drugs-and-murder case amongst a set of film people. A famous Hollywood actress somehow falls from a high balcony during a party announcing her landing a plum part. She wasn’t the nicest person in the world, so no shortage of suspects with a grudge against her, including another actress, a cameraman, a producer, the actress’s sister and so on. Freddy joins forces with another journalist, the less than scrupulous Corky Beckwith, to investigate. This series has one advantage over its predecessor – Freddy is able to take a far more active part in events than the ladylike Angela. So there’s a great deal of creeping about at night, sneaking into suspects’ houses and getting into fights. Freddy’s […]

Posted January 23, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

2016 review: Part 2: Reading

There was a time when I read 100+ books a year. In 2012, it was 108, and I also had time to review them all, write series reviews and compose long, detailed essays about my reading-related thoughts. In 2013, I read 91 books. In 2014, the year I published the first of my own books, it was 61, then 57 in 2015. In 2016 it was just 46, and that included a month in Australia with my Kindle, and a whole shedload of long-haul flights. This is the trouble with writing — it eats away at my reading time. And that also means that I have to be more selective with what I read, and I tend to be less experimental. Out come the tried-and-trusted authors, whose work I know I’ll enjoy. And the effect of that is that my average rating on Goodreads has risen from 3.3 stars to […]

Posted January 16, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in General, Ramblings / 0 Comments

Review: ‘The Warden’ by Anthony Trollope

I’ve never read any Trollope before, but my book group likes to mix things up, so here we are. This was a real surprise to me. It was published in 1855 and my previous dabblings in that era have left me less than enthusiastic. Overly wordy, sentimental, turgid and a real slog to get through – that was what I expected. What I got was funny, sharply observed, sympathetic and surprising easy to read. I have to say, though, that I’ve never read a book with so many words where so little actually happens. Much of the body of the text is made up of lovely commentary on the characters, their histories, quirks and motivations, together with the author’s opinions on the church, the newspaper industry and the legal profession. Some of that is interesting, but some is also very repetitive and long-winded, and could have been scrapped without any […]

Posted January 16, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in Review / 0 Comments

Authors Answer 19: How did you get into writing and what made you select your genre of choice?

I didn’t exactly ‘get into’ writing. For me it was never something I just took up, in the way one might decide to take up golf or macrame or yoga. I’ve always been ‘in’ writing. At school, I loved those free-for-all creative writing exercises. Not the ‘what I did on my holidays’ dullathons, but the ‘imagine you’re a fairy’ stuff. Not that there was much of that after primary school. Secondary school was far too serious for such frivolities. So I turned to writing my own comic strips, and (later) extremely bad fan fiction, although I didn’t know then what it was. A few years later, when I lived abroad and couldn’t work, I bought a manual typewriter and bashed out most of a Regency romance. Why Regency? Because that’s what I was reading at the time, trawling methodically through the entire Georgette Heyer catalogue. For a few years, the […]

Posted January 14, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in AuthorsAnswer, Writing musings / 0 Comments

Brightmoon end of year quiz – answers!

I hope you had fun with the quiz. Here are all the answers. Any comments, objections, mistakes, etc – please feel free to post a comment or to email me. 1) The Plains of Kallanash Question 1: What was Dethin’s job when Mia first met him? A) Blacksmith B) Commander of First Section C) Eastern Warlord D) Skirmisher Answer: C) Dethin was the Eastern Warlord, with power of command over several individual sections. Bulraney was the deeply unpleasant character who was Commander of First Section when Mia first arrived there. Hurst and his companions were Skirmishers.

Posted January 8, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in Brightmoon world / 0 Comments

2016 review: Part 1: Publishing

Inspired by Chris Fox’s discussion of his 2016 self-publishing financials {link below}, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at mine, which are on a much smaller scale but perhaps more typical of small-time self-pubbers. I’ve never had a wildly successful book, but they chug along bringing in income every day. To start with, let me recap my self-pubbing career to date. I published my first epic fantasy book in September 2014, and by the end of that year, I’d made royalties of $263. Sadly, my accumulated expenses at that point were $4,000. It can be expensive self-publishing; I spent money on top quality covers, professional proofreading and paperback copies, as well as a number of books and software to help improve my writing, but virtually no promotion at that point. In 2015 I did rather better. I published three more epic fantasies, and made $12,800 royalties […]

Posted January 4, 2017 by PaulineMRoss in Publishing/marketing / 0 Comments