Welcome

Mugshot taken by my lovely wife 19th July 2020.

Welcome to my  website. Readers and writers will find regular posts on a number of different topics. Here you’ll find biographical information, details of all my books, posts about writing, nature, travel, and some examples of my photographs (with links to a new site I’ve joined, where copies can be bought at a very reasonable cost to let you feature them online, produce your own prints up to A3 size, or have printed versions supplied). 

My blog is regularly updated with news, reviews, writing advice and events. The Blog has sub-menus that allow visitors to look only at ‘Reviews’, ‘Word Choice’, ‘Progress’, and ‘Opinions’. I hope this will make your experience entertaining and fruitful.

Other pages hold information on topics related to the enjoyment of books. And the Writers’ Resources page contains a table of creative writing contests, regularly updated, and two lists of more than 6,000 first names from all over the world, one for males, one for females, both highlighting non-gender names. These items can be downloaded free for your personal use. There are also links to various sites of interest to writers and readers.

By all means make suggestions using the ‘Contact’ form.

I welcome feedback on all aspects and topics, so please join in by adding your comments. I’d love to know what you think.

36 thoughts on “Welcome”

  3. Wasn’t it hard to give up 300K followers? I can’t imagine that!
    Peace, love & a wonderful 2016 to all,
    Sherrie
    Sherrie Miranda’s historically based, coming of age, Adventure novel “Secrets & Lies in El Salvador” is about an American girl in war-torn El Salvador:
    http://tinyurl.com/klxbt4y
    Her husband made a video for her novel. He wrote the song too:

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    1. It was 300k+ visits, Sherrie, gathered over a period of 3-4 years, and i placed a link on the old site so people could find me here. It was a difficult decision, but I was thinking of the future. You never know what giants like Google et al are going to do in the future: look at the mess some authors face with Amazon. WordPress allows me much more control over the website and the Blogger blog was just that: a blog.Prior to that I’d had my own website hosted via a friend’s company, but I discovered I needed a very expensive piece of software to update that, so I had to leave that one behind as well!
      I’m still working on the current site, lots of new stuff to add, but the writing is more important, so the changes will appear only slowly.

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  4. Thanks for the follow, Stuart. I love this website, Mine is due for a makeover but has to wait for my daughter to take things in hand. She’ the digital native. Looking forward to your posts!

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  5. glenavailable

    Congratulations Stuart on your shortlisting in the TO HULL AND BACK short story competition.
    Question from Planet Fandom – Do you intend to make An Eztraordinary Ezperience available to be read on your website?

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    1. As it will be appearing in the anthology, I won’t be stealing their thunder by publishing it elsewhere. I don’t publish much of my writing on the website anyway, just extracts and samples as a rule. Thanks for the congrats, Glen.

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  6. Hi Stuart,
    Your new website looks amazing and I’ll continue to follow you. My old blog was messed up by Google; it still exists but I can’t add any new posts so I made a new one: http://umennre.blogspot.com . My first book in my Christian Speculative Fantasy trilogy is up on Amazon KDP Select. During the first Amazon promotion it rose to both #12 in Science Fiction and Fantasy and Fantasy.
    David Ferretti

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    1. Thanks, Edwin. One of the reasons I changed from Blogger was because Google has the final say on sites. WordPress has the advantage that it’s crowdsourced, so there’s no likelihood of interference. Mind you, I’d had over 280,000 visits to my blog there before I changed. I think it might take a while to reach that sort of exposure again! Good luck with your writing. I’ll take a wander to your new blog later and have a gander.

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  7. I do the same, Jane. Then, from time to time, I bite the bullet and have a ‘cleansing’ day to remove the stuff I haven’t consulted for over a year.

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    1. Technophobe, eh? Not easy to deal with all these gadgets and associated stuff that that the IT nerds devise for us. I get along mostly by trial and error, with an emphasis on the ‘error’!

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  9. Hi Sherrie.
    The flags: go to the bottom right of the picture, click on the link, and it will take you to the site, where you can devise your own widget. Just instal it in the WP Admin section. Pinterest, Reddit and others come from the ‘Sharing’ tab. You click on the ‘connect’ button and WordPress does the rest. For About.me and Goodreads, you need to go to their sites and follow the instructions on the Goodreads Author page, click on ‘edite profile and then on the tab ‘widgets’. Make sure you follow the instructions for the WordPress site as you have to find the right ID number (it explains how on the site). For About me, log in, click on your name in the menu bar, select ‘Get more visitors’ from the drop down menu and then select the ‘WordPress’ tab and it tells you what to do.
    Goo luck!

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  12. Stuart, sorry to bother you but I was wondering if you could tell me where to add the link to have the Flags on the WP blog. Also, can you tell me how to add Pinterest and Reddit?
    It always seems like I spend hours trying to do something without success, then magically, one day I end up in the right spot.
    I hope the interview helps the world check out your books. And am anxiously awaiting the e-books being made into paperbacks.
    All the best,
    Sherrie

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    1. Slowly getting there. A few odd quirks that seem to be more to do with the theme than WordPress, but learning.
      Liked your FB page. Mine’s at -http://www.facebook.com/StuartAken, should you wish to visit and reciprocate (it’s still legal!).
      Relaxing today in the rain. Tomorrow more hard labour in the garden!

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      1. Oh tell me about the quirks of WP and even FB. Bah! Yes I shall pop over and ‘like’ your page of course I shall. The rain was something else yesterday, reminded me of Singapore every afternoon in the Monsoon season. Good for your garden though. Have fun. 🙂

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    1. I suspect, like so many expressions, its real source is lost in history. Certainly, some say it comes from the navy, but others say it stemmed from the world of campanology -http://www.ringingteachers.co.uk/learningtheropes/ – It would definitely be valid for either source.
      As for reading more on the new site, Madeleine, it’s my intention to do a lot more here. But, currently, the new house is taking up a good deal of my time, as are the book on my experiences of ME/CFS and a short fiction piece introducing the fantasy trilogy, A Seared Sky. And here I was, thinking retirement would bring me more time to write!

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