…honesty in memoir-writing… a double-edged sword… – Written By Seumas Gallacher

I found this post on Master Seumas’ blog. He talks about writing his memoir and shares some of his experience with us. Thank you very much for your honesty, Seumas!

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…as a writer, I love paradox… the creative balance… peak and trough… princes and paupers… sweet and sour… I shamelessly strive for emotive expression in my novels… breathing feelings into what happens to my characters… Lawd knows, they cause me enough angst when I write about them… therefore, it should have come as no surprise to me when I embarked on the ambitious project of writing my own biography… the twin imposters of delight and melancholy currently visit with great regularity as the chapters of my life unfold on my laptop… from the outset, I decided it would not be an ego trip, cataloguing whatever achievements may have been my lot, but to attempt to balance the tome with as much gut honesty as I can muster… that’s where the pain resides… it has been remarkable how the distance of time has removed some of the jagged edges of some events I’d rather not have had happen… and equally to recognise that success is also a relative concept, which lessens with the passage of the years …

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…the writer’s backlist… the gift that keeps on giving… – Written By Seumas Gallacher

Seumas Gallacher’s books are in demand! Master Gallacher describes something all authors feel: the gift of selling books. Thank you very much for your post, Seumas!

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…I can speak only for this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler, but sense that hordes of my fellow-authors will agree, that selling even one copy of one title is a source of great satisfaction… to feel that even one single reader has taken time and invested money to indulge my work is such an immense pleasure… over the years since I was first absorbed into the mind-blowing vortex that is the world of writing books, the reading public has blessed and honoured me with more than 100,000 aggregate downloads and sales of my wee literary babies… like many of my contemporary successful writers, I pretend not to pay much attention to my author’s sales pages on Auntie Amazon Kindle, but that would be a blatant lie!…

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…’S’TRODN’RY!’ – Written By Seumas Gallacher

Read Master Gallacher’s blog post about the ‘birth’ of a new word. With all his humor and wisdom, Seumas Gallacher provides us with a wonderful blog post I just had to share. Thank you, Seumas.

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…it’s not often that this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler has been present at the birth of a new word… but one such memorable occasion presented itself many, many moons ago… it happened during that part of my career when I was part of the legions of Financial Masters of the Universe, as the embodied historical photograph of the yesteryear money market/foreign exchange maestro in the dealing room in Hong Kong here indicates…

…part of the role of being a prominent F.M.U. entailed, (naturally), whizzing around the globe, ostensibly arranging mega-billions worth of deals (Master Soros, eat yer heart out!)… a trip from the Far East had my itinerary taking in financial institutional visits in London, then carrying on to Noo Yawk in ‘Murica, to repeat the exercise with some of our American banking friends…

Read the entire blog post HERE

 

…Seumas (Casper the Ghost?) Gallacher… – Written By Seumas Gallacher

Master Gallacher informs us what he’s been up to lately. We’re glad to hear you’re fine, Seumas. And we all are desperately waiting for you to return! Keep us updated. You’re sorely missed!

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…my grateful thanks for some of my Guest Posters over the past few weeks who have helped to keep my blog alive, while I was BDOT (Busy Doing Other Things)… I make no apologies for the absence, as pressure of the day job (which pays the light bulbs and printer ribbons) have seen each day filled with ‘stuff’… part of that ‘stuff’, frankly, has been a commercial stream of business allied to my writing… I’ve alluded to it a few times last year, and it has grown into a sizable chunk of my waking day… ghostwriting… sum’how, (thankfully), the WURD has gone out that Master Gallacher ‘writes a bit, and writes rather well’ – so much so, I have just embarked on my eighth ghostwriting engagement in the past twelve months, doing autobiographies and family/corporate histories…

To read the entire blog post go to:

https://seumasgallacher.com/2019/02/09/seumas-casper-the-ghost-gallacher/#respond

Tony McManus Publishes A Post On Seumas Gallacher’s Blog – Amazon’s Author Review Policy

On Master Seumas Gallacher’s blog, I found an excellent blog post, written by author Tony McManus. See what they have to say about Amazon’s author review policy.

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…my pal, Tony McManus, ponders Amazon’s ‘killing the golden goose’ policy on Author reviews…

…the following superb piece from my Author friend, Tony McManus, mirrors what so many of us in the self-publishing community feel right now:

A LOW BLOW FROM AMAZON

I have mixed emotions regarding Amazon. On the one hand, and I guess like most indie authors, I am grateful for the opportunity Amazon has given me to become a self-published independent author of thrillers. On the other hand, they do things that puzzle, baffle and annoy me.

Writing a book, a novel, fashioning a work of fiction, and doing it well, is not easy. Even for ‘natural’ writers, highly gifted and driven writers pursuing destiny, it’s hard work. That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable. A writer on a roll, writing well, enjoys a ‘high’ like nothing else on earth. Like a ride to the moon, it can be the most satisfying thing he’s ever done. He gets to feel good about things.

But then, after completion, he has to sell his book. This is the hardest part.

To continue reading this blog post, go to:

https://seumasgallacher.com/2019/01/11/my-pal-tony-mcmanus-ponders-amazons-killing-the-golden-goose-policy-on-author-reviews/

…seriously, would you buy a used bank from this man?

Master Seumas Gallacher posted a blog post about, what I think is, a ‘change of times’. As usually he not only writes humorous and thoughtful, but also provides us with pictures from his past. Thank you, Master Gallacher!

Seumas Gallacher

…the Passage of Time is a great distortionist… this mug shot above of Master Gallacher, in my prime as a Fully-Fledged Master of the Financial Universe was captured around 35 years ago… a generation away… a lifetime for some… and yet, it seems so recent… how skillful the mind tricks that can visit me… I was the Chief Trader and Treasurer for a financial institution in Hong Kong, called Wardley Limited… the merchant banking arm at the time of what was the mighty Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation… since then Wardley has morphed into ‘HSBC Investment Asia Holdings Limited’, while the parent has seen its glorious monicker contract into a rather paltry, ‘HSBC’… liquidity sloshed around the Asian markets then in billions rather than millions of dollars…

…it was an exciting and fun period… changes in appearance have been made not only to Wardley

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…Authors… there’s NUTHIN like a good killin’…

Let’s hear what Master Seumas Gallacher has to say to a good killing! Thank you for a great blog post, Seumas!

Seumas Gallacher

…we Scots are supposedly derived from martial tribes… we can even put our accent to battle when required… especially the Docklands Govan, Glasgow version… but underneath, we are truly a gentle race…  once, as a young lad of eight years, I inadvertently killed a small vole on a farm near where the family was on holiday… and I cried over that for most of that day… the Braveheart image portrayed as the norm for we Celts is true when we are riled, but in our restive state, peace reigns supreme… comes now my emergence as a writer of crime fiction… and all sorts of savagery pokes its head out… …at the last count in my Jack Calderseries, I reckon upward of a couple of dozen characters have met their various demises, ghastly and otherwise… as an aside, I am constantly amazed at the ingenuity employed by fellow scribes who…

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…Authors… how my ‘Jack Calder’ character developed…

Seumas Gallacher talks about the development of his character Jack Calder. An interesting and fascinating read of a very gifted author. Thank you, Master Seumas!

Seumas Gallacher

…ten  years ago, Master Gallacher had a faint notion to ‘write that book’ we all supposedly have in us… frankly, it was never intended to roll on into more than that initial novel, THE VIOLIN MAN’S LEGACY… the Jack Calder crime thriller series now has segued into five titles on Auntie Amazon Kindle, with a sixth as Work In Progress, and with an aggregate of more than 100,000 copies downloaded to date (gazillion thanks, you wunnerful, supportive readers!)… given that stretch of time, I can look back on how the various stages of development of JackCalder’scharacter have evolved… it may be of interest to some of my fellow-scribblers as they trudge the same happy path to literary destiny…

PHASE ONE : The faint idea of a male character forms in my wee grey cells… NUTHIN more than that… a big guy, ‘coz he’s former SAS… a…

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…Authors, fear not, the ‘business’ of story-telling is limitless…

Master Seumas Gallacher shares his opinion about limitless story telling. Thank you very much for all you teach us, Seumas! We appreciate it and we know you’re a gem!

Seumas Gallacher

…the phrase, ‘there are only seven story plots’ is an old chestnut, averred by alleged ‘literary’pundits over the years… I’m not convinced, but my take on it is a bit broader… even if the assumption of the surreptitious, silvery, slippery seven is correct… how does it explain the millions of books, novels and stories that have filled our libraries and bookshops for the past coupla thousand years?… p’raps the not-so-secret clue is in the actual ‘telling’ of the story… ask any theatre performer what differentiates a great performance from a merely good performance, and they will say “it’s in the ‘business’ on stage”… in other WURDS, “it’s the way they tell ’em”… such it is with any great book…

…granted, there are those authors whose use of vocabulary is outstanding, but even the simplest unfolding of a narrative can contain that magical element that glues readers’…

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…you keep great literature alive by giving it away… – Written By Seumas Gallacher

Master Seumas Gallacher talks about books and how to give them away (not throwing them out!) and shows how generous a character he is!

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…a quick tally of books inhabiting my small cabinet/converted bookcase will not tax emb’dy’s counting abilities… I have a sum total of only approximately 120 books… an eclectic assortment of mostly fiction, and a smattering of nonfiction… some of the greatest writers’ opus productions (Steinbeck, Dickens, O’Hara, Ruark, Conan Doyle, Solzhenitsyn, Churchill) sit comfortably alongside two Oxford Dictionaries (yeez can never have enuff WURDS), some author-signed copies of writers whose scribblings I admire, a bible, a copy of the Quran, some ad hoc compilations of humorous and other quotations, a few treasured over-a century-old Gaelic poetry and prose collections, and of course, my own Jack Calder crime thrillers…

 

To continue reading Seumas’ blog post, click here:

You keep great literature alive by giving it away