Blogs

I have just returned from a trip to Edutech 2017/Work 2.0 in Johannesburg, South Africa. I will never forget the amazing skies in the late afternoon. They were moody, electric with rolling thunder and lightning and forever changing hue. I had never seen anything like them before.

The trip entailed a 30-hour flight from New Zealand to South Africa and back. It was worth every cramped, economy class hour.

• The definition of ‘BLAH’ according to the Oxford Dictionary: ‘Used to refer to something which is boring or without meaningful content.’

Often when we write we are eager to tell our stories and we give little thought to who might read them. For some reason we imagine there are dozens of people waiting for our words, information. So it is something of a disappointment when we discover there isn't.
In fact the readers we imagined were like a mirage and they disappear in a shimmer.
So, before we start writing we need to pause. Who is our reader? What interests him or her? Who does he  or she hang out with? What makes them angry, sad or joyful?

NZ Tech Advance Educational Technology Summit – June 2017

Stylecheck [Stylefit] encourages self-directed learning = engaged students http://www.thestorymint.com/what-story-mint

NZ Tech Advance Educational Technology Summit – June 2017

Five Minute presentation

Greetings to you all.

When hands fly to throats and leap out from pockets.

We have just finished watching the excellent British TV series Broadchurch.  It dealt with rape but it was not preachy while showing how families were affected, girls especially. It turned out there were a series of rapes, most unreported because of the shame the women felt until the woman around whom the story was centred, reported her experience. She went through the horror that most rape victims experience….her past sexual history being dragged up, her behaviour which made many draw the conclusion she asked for it, and all the invasive examinations she had to endure.

My editor is my best friend and she is remarkable.

This is because when she is editing my work she is not bothered about how I might feel when she fixes my mistakes or points them out. These mistakes can be continuity problems, grammatical slipups or any number of things I miss when I am in full creative flight.

So, in fact, she is my very best friend when she is not trying to be.

When my editor dispassionately points out my errors, she makes me look good to my readers. And that is what good friends do. They watch out for each other. She has my back!

One of the mistakes some writers make is to slip into telling the reader everything that’s going on in sweeping generalisations. A reader won't see what a writer is visualising until the writer describes the scene, character or action. Until then it is a blank.

All any reader can ever see is what the writer allows him or her to see and the only way the reader can do this is if the writer takes the time to describe it.

The Story Mint has just published its first Anthology of collaboratively written short stories. There are twelve stories written by 32 authors from eight countries. It is an amazing achievement and it is a world first.

We learnt a great deal from this experiment. However, it was so successful we intend to repeat it.

CHRISTMAS MAGIC