Victoria Purdie's Storefront

INTRODUCTION: With today’s modern computer and Internet technology, you can be hiking the mountains in Alaska, fishing near a lake in Australia, watching the bright city lights in Hong Kong, watch the tide roll in on the wild west coast of New Zealand or be living on a small island off Florida, and still have a career as a writer. This isn’t a book about how to write. That’s something I believe you learn the basics of at school. From there it’s just about making the time to sit down to write, discipline, working hard, inspiration, finding markets for your writing, marketing yourself as a writer, and more hard work. Taking the rejections and still not giving up. Like anything you practise at, you’ll get better the more you write. I believe you have to have some talent to be a writer. You either can write, love to write and have to write, or you don’t write. Some people say they will start writing one day and some do, but a lot of people never get around to it. But it’s like anything that you really want to do, you’ll somehow find the time to do it. In fact part of this book was written with my left arm in a sling, having suffered a nasty accident on a water slide, dislocating my shoulder, chipping a bone off my socket, and tearing the muscles and ligaments. It slowed me down a bit I must admit, (and so did the valium) but I love writing, so was soon back to the computer to continue writing this book. You might be a closet writer with a 50,000 word novel sitting in your drawer getting dusty, and you need some clues about getting it published, or perhaps you do a bit of writing as a hobby and want to know more. Or you could be considering making money from writing while you raise children, travel the world, or you may be disabled or incapacitated in some way and find writing at home would be an enjoyable and profitable career choice. In this book, I’d like to show you some of the ropes involved in turning what’s in your heart and mind, into something you can sell, and something that you can use to inspire others. There’s nothing like telling a story to help bring forth your point or a lesson to be learned on life’s journey. People can forget facts pretty quickly, but they tend to remember a good story. The gift of story telling is an amazing talent. If you’ve got it, you should be using it, and in this book I hope to give you some clues about ways you can do that. This book has information on different types of writing for you to try, places to find markets for your work, advice on time management, information on tools of the trade, copyright information and how to protect yourself and your work from would be thieves, publicity tips, inside information on editors and publishers, hints on style, info on the Internet, its benefits and dangers, how to milk an idea, how to rewrite your work to produce many more sales from the one idea, some writers exercises, advice on how to have a column syndicated, ways to add humour to your work, how to find your inspiration, and I’ve included a Glossary of word terms to help you at the end, including many terms to do with the Internet. Thanks must go to my husband for all his support and ideas, and to my three children for being an inspiration without even knowing it, and to my friends who put up with all my mutterings about my latest crazy idea.