Blog | Alison Morton Author

The secret numbers competition…

You’ve read the fascinating interview with author Elizabeth Buchan. For a chance to win a copy Light of the Moon and read about Evelyn St John’s secret wartime life and work in France, answer the questions below. All the answers are somewhere in my blog!

Many codes in the Second World War and later were based on numbers. Letters in a message would be substituted with numbers using an agreed key. So, the answers to the quiz should produce a list of numbers.

Email the answers (not in Morse code, thank you) with each number separated by a comma, to alison [at] alison-morton.com by Friday 26 August 5pm (17:00) UK time.

How many numbered tips did I give you when researching?
What speed was my heroine doing in her Giulietta?
How many attended Lumb Bank?
How many things do we learn when taking it on the chin?
What page had I reached in my first novel when I blogged about confronting it?
How many named people in the photo at the RNA Winter Party?
How many years would I get in Holloway?
How old is book 2?

Je vous souhaite bonne chance…

The rules

The competition is open to anybody in the world.
Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entry is by email only. Please email your entry in the body of the email, NOT as an attachment and put NUMBERS QUIZ in the subject line of your email.
Deadline for receiving entries is Friday 26 August 5pm (17:00) UK time and is final. No entries received after the given date and time will be considered.
The judge’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
The winner will be contacted personally.
By entering, you agree that your name can be posted on this blog when the winner is announced.
The prize must be taken as stated. There are no cash alternatives.
No responsibility accepted for late or lost entries due to the Internet. Proof of sending is not proof of receipt.
No responsibility is accepted for ineligible entries or entries made fraudulently.
Entering this competition means you have accepted these rules and to agree to be bound by them.

A secret and a competition...

Excitement is bubbling up here at Madness Towers. Tomorrow (Friday), as the first of an occasional series of guest appearances, I will be talking to an Important and Famous Author about her writing life.

And … a signed copy of one of her books will be the prize in a competition afterwards.

Watch this space…

Wielding the red pen – catharsis or disaster?

I like the red pen. Many say it’s crushing, demeaning, aggressive. I find it’s clear and an excellent contrast to black type on white paper. and at this stage, I want clear.

As an unpublished writer, I haven’t had the experience of my work being edited by a professional publishing house editor, but as a translation project manager, I’ve corrected, edited and proofed a hell of a lot of text over 25 plus years. You can tell when a translator/writer is struggling/has a cold/is hungover/tired or bored. The writing dies.

I’m experiencing that at the moment as I grind through book 2. It’s 9 months old and just been brought out of the archive ‘drawer’. Sometimes, I’m really strict, like this:

Other times, I re-convince myself I can string more than two words together and I end up with this :

But I’m not talking about the beauty/clunkiness of the prose. I want to urge you to be strict with your own work, to try to detach and pretend it’s another person’s work, if you find that easier, and that the other person has told you to spare nothing. You are not attacking your baby. Like a child it needs both loving discipline as well as encouragement if it’s going to grow into an independent, adjusted member of the book-world.

Do you agonise or can you wield the machete, sorry, red pen, with effect?

Record visits - thank you!

Overwhelmed. An over-used word. But I am.

Thank you for all the interest nearly 200 of you have shown in the past 24 hours and are still showing in my blog, especially on the Filofax Flex. A special thank you to those shared by leaving a comment.

I hope you found it useful/enlightening/informative. Or even fun;-)

An update: over 300 of you had visited by the 36 hour mark. I didn’t know Filofaxes could be so interesting!

How Filofax kept me organised at the RNA Conference

Remember Filofax? Like many people in the 1980s, I toted a black, approx A5 sized leather folder which not only contained my diary, notes and address book, but also expenses sheets, stamp and card holders, to do lists, maps, vocabulary lists – in short, my life.

Came the electronic revolution, I waved it bye-bye. The next time I used it seriously was in 2005 for research notes when I did my MA in history. I was reminded how compact it was and how easy to carry round with me.

But I recently found (to my surprise!) that Filofax is more than a folder full of stuff. I discovered a delightful system call Flex. This appeared when I was planning my trip to the RNA Conference in Caerleon earlier this month. I needed to take plenty to write on for the copious notes I knew I would be taking, but the sheets of paper tended to fall out of the plastic folder or got lost in between other stuff.

Enter the Flex folder! It has slide-in notebooks with lined pages or plain pages and when opened on a lecture theatre table for taking notes it doesn’t overlap the neighbour’s working space. And there’s a loop for a pen or pencil, slots for cards and a tear off pad for little notes.