The Lakes, Catherine Ryan Howard, and WordPress.com websites…

Just back from a holiday in the Lake District. Its beauty alone makes it a great setting for fiction. Then the lack of mobile coverage in many places is an absolute bonus if you’re writing crime. Your heroine doesn’t need to run low on battery to stop her calling for backup… It’s where Anna, the main character in my debut novel, ends up.

Whilst I was away, I read Catherine Ryan Howard’s Self-Printed: the Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing. Although I haven’t opted for that route, the book’s got a lot of content that’s universally useful, and I’m really glad I bought it. There’s an updated version coming soon; Catherine’s blog has some information on which sections will be revised.

I enjoyed the bits on blogging and social media, and her style of delivery’s informal and humorous. She’s also convinced me to migrate my blog to WordPress.com. Although I’ve really enjoyed using Blogger, I’m now after a full website, with more flexibility. I was feeling a bit can’t-be-botheredy, technophobey about the whole operation. However, I’ve found that a) WordPress.com has excellent help pages and b) Catherine’s book offers the ultimate in hand-holding. She also covers useful add-on issues, like how to set up an info@ email address for a custom domain.

So in the next week, I will hopefully manage the final hurdle of mapping www.clarechase.com over to the WordPress site, and the transfer will be complete. It’s possible to import all existing posts, with labels, pictures and so on from Blogger, which is darned handy.

Of course, once I’ve stopped twiddling about with websites, I will actually need to get on and do things like scything down the grass in the back garden and evicting spiders from the dining room. But enough of that; I feel the urgent call to faff around with background colours…