…no, Authors… writing PERFECTION is NOT your objective…

Check out what Master Seumas Gallacher has to say about writing perfection and how it’s not our objective. Thank you very much, Seumas!

Seumas Gallacher

…blasphemy?… heresy?… ravings of a mad writer?… signs of an author finally succumbing to the madness that years of tilting at imaginary characters bring?… that this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler should posit that the purpose of creative writing is NOT to achieve perfection?… p’raps, Mabel, but just hold on a minute with that frantic phone call to the lunatic asylum to come and cart me away… in a lifetime of reading, my choices of literature have been as broad as can be… Steinbeck, O’Hara, Ruark, Christie, Dickens, Eco, Fitzgerald, Child, Austen, Churchill, Burns, Chaucer… an endless list of library index heroes… every name there acknowledged as classic in his or her own metier, regardless of genre… sparkling storytellers all… but equally, I have noted in many instances, flaws, sum’times, in their narratives… incomplete closure on certain endings… use of language occasionally misplaced… part of that may be attributed to…

View original post 222 more words

…ambition – to be the youngest centenarian ever… whaaa???

Read, what Master Gallacher has to say when it comes to aging. 😀

Seumas Gallacher

…I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘Age’ and ‘Ageism’ are two of the vilest inventions that Man has ever devised… by charting the passage of time vis-a-vis how long I’ve been physically on the planet brings a mountain of potential booby traps… scientifically, I will not deny that bodily change occurs in every human being… but there’s too much emphasis on specific numbers that tick off the pile of years that I’ve survived thus far… it’s not a race to the grave… I know when any such contrived ‘race’ started for me… its called the Date of my Birth, but I have no desire to guesstimate when the ‘End Date’ is supposed to be…  my comedic God, (now Sir) Billy Connolly says, ‘don’t call me middle-aged, ‘coz that presumes I’m half way to that as yet unknown ‘End Date’… another of his other beautiful epithets covers ‘Acting your…

View original post 232 more words

…AUTHORS… why do YOU write?…

Master Seumas Gallacher tells us why he writes!

Seumas Gallacher

…I’m led to believe that in a protracted game of chess, from start to finish, there may be possible combinations of moves amounting to billions… given the number of books that have been written since Man first discovered how to put WURDS on to stone, paper, typewriters , and computing devices, that figure of billions could easily be surpassed by the aggregate combinations of stories and narratives produced over the millennia…

…it’s not a difficult step from that suggestion to surmise there are prob’ly countless reasons why anyone in particular may want to ‘write’… when this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler first began to write seriously, about a decade ago, never having written a novel before, my primary urge was merely to see if I could actually produce and complete a whole book… little did I know what lay in store… the first time I wrote ‘The End’…

View original post 210 more words

…Authors, when yeez write,’The End’, yer WURK is just beginning…

Seumas Gallacher tells us about the life of a writer. Thank you Seumas!

Seumas Gallacher

…ten years ago, this ol’ Scots scribbler completed his first Jack Calder crime thriller, THE VIOLIN MAN’S LEGACY… I’ve shared before the exquisite sensation of floating, pink-cloud ecstasy of having actually written a whole novel… with no safety net, no helpers, and no idea that the addiction of becoming writer was looming large in my life… I was also unaware of my ‘wet-behind-the-ears’naiveteas a ‘newbie’ author… back then, oh, blessed innocence, I thought all I had to do was to send the finished manuscript off to a London publisher and presto, hey, I’d become a millionaire, literary giant in short order… Right? Wrong!… many, if not all, of my fellow-penspersons will have trodden the same route… eventually the cold, hard facts of a writer’s life began to sink in… the WURLD does not owe me fame and fortune just because I’ve written a book, nor indeed…

View original post 240 more words

…Authors… a wee re-musing about minor characters in yer masterpieces…

Read what Seumas Gallacher has to say about minor characters. Thank you, Seumas.

Seumas Gallacher

…I carried this post over a year or so ago, and thought it worth another airing… enjoy…

…there’s no doubt major characters in a novel carry the storyline to the reader-at-large… the confluence of their highs and lows (in the scribblers’ jargon – ‘the crisis – the solution – the next crisis – the subsequent solution, ad inforeverum’) are the meat and drink of most dramas… but, right here, I must ‘fess up… the delight in having lesser lights intrude is important to this ol’ Jurassic writer… it’s more than just the scrivener’s equivalent of wallpaper music in the  elevator, or the colour of the restaurant’s backdrop… the insertion of wee players at pivotal points in my books relieves the main characters from having do everything themselves to move the chapters along… more often as not, they can also provide much needed humorous interludes in an otherwise heavy-duty regimen…

View original post 223 more words

…my life gives me writing… my writing gives me life…

Read what Seumas Gallacher has to say about writers and life.

Seumas Gallacher

…this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler has come to understand that being of a certain age does not necessarily bring enhanced wisdom… indeed, all too often, it highlights remarkable nuttiness… but it can breed the indulgence of pockets of awareness of some self-spun truths… my introverted philosophies can creep out of what remains of the wee grey cells at any time… and I confess, I do enjoy these interludes… one such minor epiphany struck me today… that my life gives me writing… my writing gives me life… my career, travels, experiences, and relationships, spanning more than five decades and four continents, have more than amply filled the mem’ry bank with material for a hundred-fold of the books I’ve written so far… my fiction, as with that of most authors I know, is an amalgam of all I have seen, heard and felt, mixed with a sum’times over-imaginative brain… but it cannot…

View original post 251 more words

…Authors, as much as possible, check the facts…

Excellent advice, Seumas Gallacher. Thank you for sharing your experience with us!

Seumas Gallacher

…it will come as no surprise to some of yeez to learn that as a wee boy at school in Docklands, Govan in Glasgow, Master Gallacher was a bit of a ‘smart-ass’…a trait that has doubtless recognisably carried forward into my more advanced years…  always first to raise my hand to try to answer the teacher’s questions… always striving to be first finished with the classroom-bound written exams so I could, “…go ootside and play, noo, please Miss?”… comes now ‘The Writer Age’… the Scribbler-at-Large...  pensmith of novels… blithely transferring the contents of what’s left of my wee grey cells onto the laptop, hopefully for international reader consumption, and possible approbation… thus far, yer Lordships and Ladyships of the e-Reading Universe have wrought unbounded kindness and generosity on my WURKS, by downloading my baby masterpieces on a regular  basis… Kindlers Listers, all, yeez…

View original post 278 more words

…and in other news… bestselling Author, Master Gallacher, turns commercial (shock! horror!)…

Master Gallacher offers his knowledge and experience to all of us authors! This is great news!!

Seumas Gallacher

…far be it from this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler to blow his own bagpipe, but in seems a groundswell has taken place whereby enuff other writing folks deem my supposed prowess in the craft sufficient for them to entrust their own wee literary baby masterpieces to my eye for, either/or/or both, proofreading and copy editing… I posted the undernoted to my Facebook page a few days ago, and am gratified to have received enquiries from other quillspersons already… (if yeez don’t let them know where yeez are, how else are they gonna find yeez, Mabel?)… as they say in all the classic notices like this… ‘quotes available by return’…

To my Author/Wannabe Author Friends:

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been honoured by approaches from fellow writers and bloggers (established and beginners) to bring my professional writing skills to bear on THEIR work. It has developed into…

View original post 210 more words

…Authors… Giveaways, Freebies and Promos are all a matter of balance…

This blog post, written by Seumas Gallacher teaches about giveaways, freebies and promos and how they are all a matter of balance.
Thanks so much for this educating and interesting blog post, Seumas!

Seumas Gallacher

…as a writer, I’m often asked, ‘why give yer stuff away for free?’… this ol’ Jurassic Scots scribbler can be as charitable as the next man… but, with a nod to my Caledonian heritage, and to quote a famous writer of the past, “…his generosity knows bounds!…”…delving into the wunnerful WURLD of self-publishing ten years ago, heralded an entire raft of nuances and ‘tricks of the trade’on Auntie Amazon’s Kindle… all in the quest of finding the sweet spot for broadening my readership, and seeing the sales and downloads graphs head skyward… experimentation was the order of the day, mixing and matching the various methods of tempting subscribers… Free Promo spells… auction bids… then Goodreads Giveaways, throwing as many as five or ten copies of books at a time at lucky draw winners… Facebook readers’ groups, much more satisfying, because at least the author gets to…

View original post 221 more words

…the beauty of the ear is in the lobe of the beholder…

Master Seumas walks down a new road with Audio Books. Congrats Seumas! Keep on walking! ❤

Seumas Gallacher

…it takes a l-oooooooooo-ng time for this ol’ Scots Jurassic to adapt to new things… I didn’t start wearing long trousers until I was about 15 years old… when I acquire a new cellphone (I believe they’re called ‘mobile phones’now), it takes an absolute age for me to understand what WURKS differently from the old one… and as for calculators, to this day, I still eschew them in favour of using my mental arithmetic skills, honed at the desks of great Scottish primary school teachers…  and I recall when I moved to Hong Kong as a fully-fledged Master of the Financial Universe in 1980, it was all of six months before I dared attempt to eat the local Chinese food (which, of course, is excellent fare, by the way)… little wonder then, that as an Author of some ten years standing now, it has taken until now to embrace…

View original post 202 more words