Anna Jones Buttimore

Following my post last week about the five tools no writer  should be without , here are five more you might like to consider.  getcoldturkey.com This nifty little site/app blocks Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pintrest or whatever your primary distraction is for a set period of time, so that you can get on with your work. It's not free, but you choose what you pay and up to 90% of it goes to charity. An Editor With more and more self-published books flooding the market, good editing is more important that ever. The manifold errors and myriad typos in them give them away as a cheap and shoddy product, and that's very damaging to the industry. I read a book with a spelling mistake  in the title,  for goodness' sake! If you want your book to look professional, it needs to be well edited. Of course, editing is expensive, but  check out this blog post  to find out how you can get bargain basement editing. Grammarly's Plagiarism Checker App...

My first novel was published thirteen years ago and I'm now working on my eighth. During that time I've come to rely on several tools which I couldn't imagine writing a book without. Now, I'm not talking about the obvious things like a computer and spell-check. Let's take those as read, shall we? But if you don't already know about them, these five things may just enhance your work as a writer. Dropbox ( www.dropbox.com )  Dropbox is cloud storage, like Microsoft's OneDrive or Google Drive, but it happens to be the one I'm most familiar with. It's free to use unless you want to have mega amounts of storage space and it means you can work on your novel anywhere, and you'll never lose it, even if your computer dies and you lose the entire contents of your hard drive. Grammarly Grammarly are sponsoring this blog post (thank you!).  You can go to the Grammarly website and paste in some text, and it will check it for all sorts of grammatical pro...

Only the second book by Wm Paul Young, author of surprise bestseller The Shack , Cross Roads is an incredibly complex and ambitious book which needs to be read slowly, carefully and thoughtfully, and ideally with a notepad to hand. Tony Spencer is a character I had problems getting to grips with. At the start of the book he's ambitious, sociopathic and paranoid. A brain tumour leaves his body in a coma and his soul, or maybe his spirit (the book did explain the difference but not in a way I could understand) wandering in a wilderness which represents his mind and interacting with Irish Jack, Jesus, and a Native American Grandmother who turned out to be the Holy Spirit. He responds by breaking down in remorse, and later he shows depths of compassion which seem at odds with the character built up in the first chapter. He also seems to take all the strange things that happen to him entirely in his stride, and knows a vast amount about Christianity for someone whose only relig...