This week I started a 10 week course at Cardif University's Lifelong Learning centre. It's two hours a week looking at all aspects of writing a novel, From deciding your theme and setting, character development, narrative, through to editing and ways to find a publisher.
My personal understanding is that building a platform via social networking is a helpful if not essential tool in creating visibility as a writer and building up a reputation that alongside what will hopefully be high quality work (once this second full edit is done!) will achieve more kudos with potential agents and gain their interest in my work.
Although I have already written a full rough draft of my first novel I want to take forward to publishing, I am excited that the course will help me as I embark on my roughly begun second project and also raise the standard of the first as go through the editing stage.
Our first assignment is to write the blurb that would appear on the back of our published novel. I love the optimism of this, it's right up my street, it is however one of my weakest areas.
I decided to flex this muscle and practice writing such blurbs for a number of project ideas I have and also to read the backs of every novel I can lay my hands on. I will ask myself, do I want to read this book? If not, why? If so, why?
