Isn't it about time women got justice in life and fiction?

Someone I know very well and care about very deeply, was walking to her car in broad daylight just as she'd done so many times before. She'd just put in a 12 hour shift at the hospital where she works as a nursing assistant and was so tired she'd trouble putting one foot in front of the other. She was desperate to get home because her cat hadn't come back the night before and she was worried about him.

She was about 5 steps away from her car when she heard a voice.

"Lady, I think you dropped something."

She didn't think she had, but turned around anyway.

When the fist pummelled into her face she fell and hit her head on the pavement. Too dazed to get up, she could do nothing as the man dragged her into bushes. She was raped and beaten so badly even her own mother didn't recognise her.

She'd scratched her attacker, so she had his blood under her fingernails, but there was a mix up at the forensics lab and the only sample they had got lost. The police made an arrest, but they let the man go because his lawyer argued that her identification of him wouldn't stand up in court because she'd been concussed when she’d fell.

Cathy (not her real name) is not alone in not getting justice.

In the UK, the prosecution rate for rapists is pathetically low. According to official figures in the UK for 2012, only one in 30 victims (the majority of them women) can expect to see their attacker brought to justice. In 2010, Jane Clough was murdered by former boyfriend Jonathon Vass who'd been released on bail whilst awaiting trial for raping her several times.

In the USA, it's more difficult to determine, but it wouldn’t surprise me if most women who are raped don’t get to see their attacker convicted.

I wrote Hell To Pay because I wanted to see an everyday woman turn the table on her attackers after the law failed her. I was sick of seeing strong, brave women like my friend subjected to the vilest of assaults and left with victim's guilt. Cathy once said to me that the police asked her why she didn't ask a male colleague to walk her to her car. The question upset her. She felt as though they were blaming her for being attacked.

In time, she started to think they were right.

In my friend's case she never got justice. She never saw the man (if anything that can be called a man could do such cruel things aimed at achieving the maximum hurt and degradation to another human being) in the dock and never got to tell her story to a court.

The Crime Files books come with a guarantee: that women will always get justice and the bad guys will be punished. Maybe, just maybe, one day that will happen in real life.

Note - this piece first appeared at http://diehardforgirls.weebly.com/1/post/2013/07/isnt-it-about-time-women-got-justice.html

Disclaimer: the Crime Files books are pure, escapist fiction and do not in any way advocate violence.

Order links for Hell to Pay (Crime Files Book 1) on Kindle

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.ca

Amazon.com.au

****Coming soon in paperback***

Books 2 and 3 are also available. 

Book 2 

Book 3 

Why is it when women get revenge they're called man-hating bitches, men are called heroes?

We need more strong women like The Walking Dead's Michonne and Carol in fiction.

I wrote Hell To Pay because I was sick of the way women are portrayed in
fiction. Whilst TV shows like The Walking Dead (has there ever been a more kick
ass woman in a TV show as Michonne) and Person of Interest (hey, we're spoilt
with three strong women in one show) have cottoned onto the fact that women are
just as likely to punch a mugger as hand over their handbag, fiction seems to be
trailing behind with far too few exceptions like the excellent Detective DD
Warren series by Lisa Gardner and Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoloi and Isles.

In Hell to Pay, office worker Nancy Kerr comes home to find her parents
tortured and murdered. The culprits, two men repeatedly rape her and leave her
to bleed to death on the floor after they've repeatedly stabbed her. Nancy has a
breakdown and when she recovers she has just one goal - to get revenge on the
men who ruined her life.

The response I've had has fallen into two camps -
the overwhelmingly positive with people saying it's about time women got
revenge just like men (and many of the readers saying that have been men) and
the ones who dismiss Nancy as a man hating bitch.

The second opinion surprises me and after spending time thinking about why a woman who goes after her parents killers and the men who raped her and left her for dead, should be described as "man hating," I've come to the conclusion that women just aren't meant to get their revenge.

Nope, they're meant to turn the other cheek and forgive their attackers and just move on with their lives. They're certainly not allowed to use violence. 

I've interviewed women who've survived rape and the one thing that seems common to
 them all is the guilt they feel. When they were attacked, they were powerless. There was nothing they could do, yet they blamed themselves. They believed there was something they could have done; they should have fought more. For some of them that feeling was so intense that they took their own lives or became terrified to go
out. 

Out on April 28th

That's why I wrote revenge thriller Hell To Pay, the first in a series of books I've
called the Crime Files. I wanted to have some escapist fiction where a woman
does get her own revenge, because let's be honest here, the conviction rates for
rape are pitiful.

Why don't you read Hell To Pay and tell me whether Nancy Kerr is really a "man-hating bitch" or an avenging warrior?

I'd be interested to know what people think.
You can read an excerpt here

Order links for Hell to Pay (Crime Files Book 1) on Kindle

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.ca

Amazon.com.au

****Coming soon in paperback***

Books 2 and 3 coming out on May 12th and May 26th.

There's somebody outside the door...Introducing Don't Come for Me (Crime Files #3) (out May 26th)

THERE'S SOMEONE AT THE DOOR...

Crime thriller, Don't Come for Me is based on something that's probably happened to us all.

You're alone at night, in the bathroom when you hear a noise outside the door.

And there's this tiny part of you, the primaeval part of you that thinks there's someone outside that door.

SOMEONE WAITING

TO GRAB YOU

SOMEONE WAITING

TO ROB YOUR HOUSE

In almost every case, there will be nobody outside that door. Or, it'll be your cat/dog who's knocked down some furniture.

But, what if someone is out there?

What do they want?

Who are they?

That's how the idea for Don't Come For Me came about.

You can find out what's outside Nancy Kerr's door, by reading Don't Come for Me.

Released May 26th, 2015 from Limitless Publishing (Book 3 in the Crime Files)

Check out the other books in the Crime File series

Tips for writing a successful novella

I stumbled onto writing novellas by accident. I saw a snippet of news in Writers' News magazine. It said that a publisher was looking for revenge novellas and was struggling to find women to write them. It was one sentence, but it caught my eye.

Three years later, I have a contract for two novellas in my *Die Hard for Girls series and a publisher interested in the first novella I ever wrote. At last, I had found my niche.

*Note - the Die Hard for Girls books  will be relaunched and re-released by my new publisher, Limitless Publishing as the Crime Files in April and May 2015. 

Here's my top 5 tips on writing novella -

1. You need to be able to pitch your novella in one sentence. Any more than that and it's probably a novel you're writing.

2. Short chapters are ideal for novellas. They keep readers interested. 

3. Your main character's goal should be the main theme of the novella. For instance, the theme for Hell To Pay (the book will be relaunched and re-released by my new publisher soon) is revenge and how Nancy Kerr avenges her parents' murder and her rape.

4. End every chapter with a revelation, a question or a shock that will have readers racing to the next chapter.

5. Your main character should be someone readers will want to go on a journey with, usually a heroine or a hero. If he or she is a villain, make some part of them sympathetic. If you don't, it will put readers off.

For more tips on writing a novella, check out the piece I wrote for Words With Jam. To read it click here

Happy writing:)

Whatever you do, don't start your novella like Snoopy.


Book 1 in the Crime Files
Available April 28th

Coming soon from Limitless Publishing - the Crime Files

Introducing the Crime Files

COVER REVEAL - I'm very excited to announce that Limitless Publishing will be bringing out three of my books over the next few months. 

Hell To Pay will be published on April 28th and Throwaways will be out on May 12th. The publication date for the third, Don't Come for Me, will be May 26th. 

The books were formerly known as the Die Hard for Girls series (although half the readers were men) and I'd like to thank everybody who read both books and who took the time to review them. I really appreciate it.

Both books are being relaunched as the Crime Files.  

Check out the covers. What do you think? 

John Steinbeck reviews the reviewers

This is a bit naughty, but I like it:) 

"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, 

I say ignore the bastard." - John Steinbeck 

How bad punctuation could kill grandma

Here's the proof that poor puncuation can kill. 

Not just grandma, but anyone.

So, you've written a novel. What next?

You're novel's all written. What do you do next?

First, off step away from the manuscript. Have some fun. Zap zombies on a computer game. Catch up with your favourite TV show. Hey, the whole new season of Orange is the New Black is on Netflix.

Had a break? Feel rested? Now it's time to look at your manuscript again with fresh eyes.

You're looking for -

Spelling mistakes - do not trust spell checkers. They can lull you into a false sense of security and change words. Mine change violet jumpsuit to violent. Don't know what it had against violent.

Plot holes - did you bring a dead character back to life? Not resolve a part of the storyline that needed to be resolved? Don't leave someone standing on the ledge of a building without having them persuaded not to jump, or rappelling down to break into that office.

Look for continuity errors - Did you rename a character halfway through the book or change the spelling of their name? Were they shot or kidnapped, and you carried on writing like they hadn't been?

Get rid of all the fluffy words like just and only as much as you can. They don't read well and are unnecessary.

Did you commit the sin of writing he/she started to (ADD AN ACTION like run) - Have someone run not start to run.

Check for errors you and only you would make - For instance, I had stench the flow of blood instead of staunch the flow in one of my books and I did I even notice. My publisher's copy editor didn't, but the proof reader did. But, she only spotted one, another two instances were left in the book.

Don't have characters doing the same thing all the time -
I found too many taking a deep breath in my latest book. Shake it up. Have characters doing different things.

Please don't send your novel off without the best chance of publishing success. Publishers and agents want you to make it easy for them to say no. Don't hand them that reason.

Happy writing folks. Would love to hear what you are working on.

Is Kindle Unlimited hitting author incomes?

Is Kindle Unlimited picking authors pockets?

Kindle Unlimited sounded like it might actually help authors to reach a wider readership. For a relative small sum a month ($9.99), members can read as many Kindle books as they want. Authors like me hoped that would lead to our books that wouldn't otherwise be bought, being lent instead and us getting a payment (albeit less than what we'd get for a sale) for each loan.

Sadly, I've found Kindle Unlimited has lost me money, especially for my non-fiction title, Living Cruelty Free: Live a More Compassionate Life.

I put a lot into writing that book. More than I put into any of my fiction titles, because I had to do so much gruelling, distressing research into animal cruelty and human cruelty towards other humans that gave me nightmares. All of the research took almost a year to do and I had to decipher complicated laws that made my head spin.

I had a publisher for the book, who badly let me down and didn't send me a royalty statement in 2 whole years since the book was published, causing me so much stress trying to get the rights to my own book back. Then I self-published. I did everything myself and it cost me more money than I could afford.

Considering the work that went into Living Cruelty Free, a book readers could turn to again and again, I felt a Kindle price of £4.99 ($8.99 in the USA) was fair.

Sadly, I'm starting to notice a trend. I sell a book and it shows up in my sales on KDP. Soon after, usually within an hour, that book appears as returned and a loan shows up almost right away.

So, what's happening?

To me, its simple.

People are either 1. Buying the book by mistake, instead of borrowing it using Kindle Unlimited, and then they're returning the book and borrowing it.

Or, 2. Borrowing the book because it costs nothing.

You can't blame readers. But, you can blame Amazon for having the facility to buy and borrow a book on the same page (which i believe is confusing people) and for coming up with a scheme that takes even more money away from writers.

Borrow rates for authors on KU in 2024

When one of my book sells, I make $6.26 or £3.37 on a 70% royalty. On a loan, I make just over a dollar. So you can see how I lose out every time a buyer switches to a lender.

I'm not alone in this. Other authors are also being hit in the pocket, and many of them used to be big earners. See here

What's your experience of KU? How has it affected you? I would love to hear your experience. 

There's somebody outside the door...introducing Don't Come For Me

Hell to Pay is based on something that's probably happened to us all.

You're alone at night, in the bathroom when you hear a noise outside the door.

And there's this tiny part of you, the primaeval part of you that thinks there's someone outside that door.

SOMEONE WAITING
TO GRAB YOU

SOMEONE WAITING
TO ROB YOUR HOUSE

In almost every case, there will be nobody outside that door. Or, it'll be your cat/dog who's knocked down some furniture.

But, what if someone is out there?
What do they want?
Who are they?

That's how the idea for Don't Come for Me came about.

You can find out what's outside Nancy Kerr's door by reading Don't Come for Me.

OUT SOON 

For 2 days only, The Restless Dead is FREE on Kindle Dec 23rd Dec 24th

To celebrate the re-launch of my zombie novel as The Restless Dead with a fantastic new cover, the book s FREE today and tomorrow on Kindle.

Here's a taster -
Somebody attacked Archie and that somebody had to be a zombie because last time I checked, the dead didn’t wake up, stinking of putrefying flesh and try and bloody eat you.” 
And so begins Emma and Scott’s battle for survival against the things they dub dead bastards. Teaming up with self-proclaimed zombie expert Kenny, who works in Glasgow’s last remaining video store, macho man Mustafa from the newsagents and mystery man Doyle, they face a battle to survive the flesh eating hordes rampaging through Scotland.
Now they have just one aim – 
JUST
DON'T
GET
BITTEN. 

"If Shaun of the Dead met The Walking Dead, you'd get The Restless Dead."

The offer starts on December 23rd at midnight (Pacific Central Time), which is 8am in the UK and ends at midnight (PCT) on December 24th, which is 8am on December 25th in the UK.

Here's the links -
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.UK
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com.au

Please pass on the link to anyone you think may be interested. I'd really appreciate it and if you do read The Restless Dead, please leave a few words on Amazon. Thanks:)

Take care and stay safe in the zombie apocalypse.

Out now - Living Cruelty Free - Live a more Compassionate Life

Living Cruelty Free offers tips and advice on how we can be kinder to animals and each other, and live a kinder life.

It’s an essential guide for anyone who wants to become a more ethical shopper: to avoid buying the cruellest things on the planet, like fur, Foie gras, and clothes made using slave labour.

There are also tips on how to go free range, become vegetarian, or just reduce your meat intake, and to make sure the cosmetics you buy are not tested on animals.

When I became a vegetarian 28 years ago, I wish this information had been available to me.

The book's available at 
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.ca

The book has a companion blog.

Why should you read Hell To Pay?

Why should you read Hell To Pay?

1. In real life women don't usually get revenge on their attackers, Nancy Kerr does.
2. If you like strong women, you'll like Nancy Kerr.
3. There's a handsome strapping sidekick called Tommy McIntyre.

Hell to Pay is now available on Amazon. 

You can read an extract from Hell To Pay on the excellent Wattpad site by clicking here.

Is it time to say goodbye to your publisher?

Sometimes it's time to say goodbye

As I write this, I'm scared, very scared. After a thoroughly demoralising time with one of my publishers that made me ill, I decided to get the rights to my two books with them back. Moving from having a publisher to doing everything yourself and self-publishing, is very scary indeed.

Now I'm responsible for everything from cover design to editing and the thing that scares me most is getting it wrong. But, my publisher's actions left me with no choice. 

You see, I had high hopes for these books. They were the first two in a series I'd created called Die Hard for Girls. They were my babies, lovingly crafted. I'd already written the third.

Judging by the readers reports by the publisher, they shared my enthusiasm. Sadly, that didn't translate into any real effort on their part. In fact, the publisher started to charge for services that they shouldn't have. Things like converting your book into an eBook and even, at one point, putting it into print. 

I won't go into all that. It's a long and boring story - hey, even I'm bored with it. But, what I will say is that I spent hours and hours trying to get my book the marketing they promised me and getting basic things like categories fixed and my author name spelled correctly.

Example - Throwaways, my crime thriller about Glasgow sex workers being kidnapped, was listed as true life and erotica. My, was my mum surprised about that:)

Now, it's down to me to do things right. It's daunting, but invigorating at the same time. Having two covers designed was particularly exciting. 

Dead Bastards by Jennifer Lee Thomson (An extract)

Dead Bastards (An Extract)

We couldn’t handle Archie staring back at us with accusing eyes, and he stank, so I covered him up with a duvet. A pink one with polka dots, which is the only spare one we have.

Scott spotted what he called the girly duvet and screwed up his face. “He’s my mate. We need to show him some respect.”

I’m irritated his pal has bled all over the new rug, yet I’m the one getting all the aggro for using a pink duvet.

Instead of coming up with an alternative to cover up his friend, Scott stood there with a stern expression on his face and shook his head. “It’s just no right.” Then his eyes grew wide and staring as he gawped at the duvet. “I think it moved.”

I snorted and shook my head. “How can it have moved? He’s deid. His stomach’s on our carpet.”

Just because Scott didn’t consider the duvet manly enough for his pal, didn’t give him the right to try to freak me out. But I looked down anyway.

At first, I didn’t see any movement, but I carried on watching. Then Archie’s feet started moving, making a tapping motion as if dancing in time to music. Before I’d seen it for myself, I thought that what happened to all those others on TV was not the same as what happened to Archie, because making that connection would open a whole Pandora’s Box of trouble.

Denial is after all a way of shielding myself from the truth. But eventually realisation dawns, especially when Archie started doing a tap dance on my living room floor. “Fuck, he’s no deid.”

While he’s doing this I realised there’s one last thing we can do for him: cave in his head.

Scott gives me his teacher-doesn’t-approve stare. “Wish you wouldn’t swear, Emma. It makes you ugly.”

As if my swearing was our biggest problem right now.

I wanted to give him an earful for chastising me like I was one of his pupils, but I’m too busy watching as dead Archie takes a hacking breath and tries to get up.

I don’t say anything. I couldn’t breathe. I simply held out my finger and pointed as if auditioning for the National Lottery’s It Could Be You ad. But this was one lottery I sure as hell didn’t want to win.

Archie flung the duvet asunder. His ash-grey face was set in a grimace that reminded me of a Mayan death mask. He looked like hell, which was no surprise considering his innards were spread out all over our carpet. But it’s his eyes that were the real giveaway that Archie wasn’t Archie anymore. He had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, but now those eyes were gone, replaced by dead orbs, as black as coal. They lacked that spark of humanity and self-awareness, whatever it is that makes us human.

Something clicked in that brain of his. He stared at us like a starving dog eyeing someone's dinner. His mouth dropped open and rancid black sludge spilled out. Then he howled.

I thought I was going to puke.

He grabbed for my arm, his blackened teeth as sharp as knives snapping at me. I managed to sidestep his reach.

A scream shrieked out of my throat before I could stop it.

HOW TO KILL A ZOMBIE

The thing about being confronted by zombies is that we all think we’ll know what to do. We’ve all seen the movies, watched the TV shows. To kill a zombie you need to splatter the brains all over the shop with a gun. But the reality is different for those of us living in Scotland where we don’t have guns in our wardrobes or locked in a box, because we don’t keep guns, period. That makes killing the zombies damn difficult.

My boyfriend is useless as a handyman, so there’s no toolkit in our third floor tenement flat. We have no hammers, chisels, or drills to destroy the brain of the zombie who used to be my boyfriend’s best pal.

Okay, this so-called pal drives me mental, like the time he got Scott, who’s not a big drinker, steamboats one night and dragged him along to a lap dancing bar where he ended up slipping crisp twenties into Monique or Cindi’s g-string. (I know this because he kindly recorded footage on Scott’s mobile phone.) I’m still pissed about that, but I don’t hate him to the extent that I want to cave his head in. 

So when the thing that used to be Archie, struggles to its feet and lumbers towards us, arms outstretched, as if pretending to be rent-a-ghost, I snatch the first thing I can get my mitts on, an iron I’d forgotten to turn off, and I scud him across the head with it.

There’s an almighty hiss as it scorches his flesh, accompanied by the smell of burnt barbecue. The iron trundles onto the floor where it lies, scorching the carpet. I can’t believe what I’ve just done, and my hand goes limp.

Archie’s makes a throaty noise and lurches towards me. That's when Scott gets busy, bludgeoning his best mate over the head with an ugly, heavy lamp his parents had bought us as a housewarming present.

Globs of sticky brain matter splatter the wall as though someone dumped mince in a blender without the lid on and switched it to turbo, but Scott still keeps whacking dead Archie, because dead Archie keeps coming at me.

My back's to the wall. Will he not die, again?

The Restless Dead is available on Kindle and in Paperback 

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com

Amazon.ca

Amazon.de  

David Cameron gets eaten by zombies - The Restless Dead now out in paperback

By popular demand, zombie novel The Restless Dead is now out in paperback with an alternative ending and some bonus material. And a brand new cover.

You can check it out at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Thanks so much to everyone who has already bought the book as an ebook and who asked me to bring out a paperback version.

Let's defeat the zombie hordes together:)

A sneak peek from Don't Come For Me

Prologue

You're in the bathroom late at night when you hear a noise coming from outside the door, and there's this tiny part of you, the product of centuries of genetic programming designed to make you fight or flee, that thinks there's someone inside your house. 

Somebody waiting for you outside that door.

Panic sucks the air out of your lungs.

Your dread of what's outside that door places an icy hand on your shoulder.

All kinds of scary thoughts are going through your mind. Different permutations of what's outside the door.

Has someone broken in and they're going through your stuff?

Is someone there determined to do you harm as they have in the past?

There's this tiny voice inside your head telling you not to be so silly. You're imagining things. After what happened before that's understandable, but you can't let fear rule your life. Be the boss of you.

When you open that door, you'll feel ridiculous when you see that nobody's there.

There is no bogeyman waiting.

You open the bathroom door, confidently to prove you don't care; that you've mastered your irrational fear. Not tentatively like you want to, so you can turn on your heels and slam the door shut. Just an inch so you can get a peek at what's out there.

In a few seconds, you're going to be laughing about this. To feel a fool.

With your heart beating in your ears, the door swings open and right away, you see that you were right to be worried.

Both chairs are upturned in the living room and the TVs been pulled out of its brackets. Your boyfriend's nowhere to be seen.

You go into the kitchen and there's a knife on the floor and a pool of blood. You're trying to take all this in as your heart thumps against your breastbone on stereo.

That's when the police turn up, threatening to break down the door if you don't open up.

Surveying the scene you know that they're gonna think you killed him...

My name is Nancy Kerr and I'm not a murderer. Since my parents were murdered I've come close a few times, but I've never done the deed.

I did tattoo the world RAPIST across the stomach of one of my parents' killers. But to me that was justified, righteous revenge because when I walked in on those monsters who’d killed my parents, they raped me and left me bleeding to death on the kitchen floor of my childhood home. What happened caused me to have a breakdown and I ended up in a psychiatric hospital where I was in the land of the zombies for fourteen months. I have no memory of most of what happened there.

But, hey, that's another story.

Accused of my boyfriend Tommy's murder, I need to prove my innocence. It won't be easy. Confronted by the same scene as the police, I would think I was guilty too. And, Tommy's still missing, presumed dead and murdered by me.

The clock's ticking. 

DON'T COME FOR ME IS COMING SOON...

HarperCollins Australia submissions - but only on a Wednesday

HarperCollins Australia are accepting submissions from all over the world and not just Australia - but only on a Wednesday.

Check out their site for details. 

There's no email address.

You need to upload your work to an online that appears - yeah, you guessed it, on a Wednesday.

They want to see - 

a synopsis of your work (it doesn't tell you until you upload, but it has to be 300 words or less) 
the first 50 pages or first three chapters of your manuscript
a short note about yourself


Happy writing and good luck. 

And, remember, follow the guidelines, folks. Don't make it easy for them to say "NO."

What do I write about? - Story Cues

In the first of a regular series, I'll help to answer the question - What do I write about?

A great way to come up with a story idea is to -

Take a familiar item and give it a twist. 

1. Your character gets a text message on their mobile - "We've got your son."

2. The washing machine is making a rattling sound. There's nothing in the drum, but when the back panel is taken off there's a bloody knife hidden inside.

3. You come out of the supermarket to find a strange woman in your car. She's holding a gun and insists she knows you.

Free Zombie story - Pick Your Brain

What would happen once the zombie apocalypse was over and people (and zombies) were forced to justify their actions?

This is a picture from UK zombie drama In The Flesh.

That's the scenario I took and then ran with it for my short story Pick Your Brain.

It's free for your enjoyment over at the wonderful Pulp Metal Magazine.

Feel free to have a read and comment. I'd love to know what you think.

What kind of writer are you? I'm a scattergun.

I'm half way through writing a novel and when I tell people how I'm writing it they think I'm crazy.

For starters, I don't sit and plan every chapter. Instead, I start with an idea. This can be the premise of the book i.e. woman is accused of murdering her boyfriend who she knows isn't even dead.

Then I just run with it, using the scattergun method of writing.

In other words, I write whatever I'm driven to write. This can be a scene from any part of the book.

Sometimes I have the ending before I have the second chapter.

The upside of this method, is two fold -
1. that I never get bored, so I don't think the reader will either
2. my writing is crispier and fresher because I'm not forcing my writing

Of course, there's a major downside -
eventually I will get to the point where I have to write a certain part; to connect up the dots. Writing those bits can be hard, but then writing is hard. You've got to bleed onto the paper.

The scattergun method might not be to everybody's taste, but it works for me. And you've got to stick with whatever works for you, because there are so many methods that don't work.

If I had a penny for every time someone said "I'm going to write a novel" who didn't, I'd be a millionaire.

So, what kind of writer are you? 

Now for something completely different...meet the love angel

Over the years, I've dabbled in so many different genres. My latest is in paranormal romance. I've written it under the of name Jennifer Sweetdance.

The Love Bureau is out in time for Valentine's Day. Here's the blurb -

What if your love life was a mess and the angel who was dispatched to find you true love was more messed up than you? This love angel's in for some love lessons of her own.
Meet Abigail, the Love Bureau angel who cannot fly.
She’s on a mission to save MandySue’s love life from cheaters and womanizers.
Problem is, back home in heaven, Abigail’s angelic husband is no saint either.
Dreams of flight and true love forge a bond between these two women that will move heaven and earth.

You can get The Love Bureau today from Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA1Y64C
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00IA1Y64C
http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00IA1Y64C