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The very first blog I’ve ever written

Hello, my esteemed Reader.

Frankly, I have no idea what I’m doing here. I never had a Homepage, or a blog, and my Facebook page suffers from chronic neglect. It’s not that I can’t be arsed, I just never felt that I have interesting stuff to share.

But apparently, in this time and age, if someone wants to be a successful writer, one needs a Homepage. So here I am. Bought my first Domain ever, tried, configurated, accidentally deleted everything I had written so far, messed up the entire menu, started from scratch again, and nearly threw my phone out of the window. I’m not exactly tech savvy, I have to admit. But now I think I got a vage idea how things work.

Besides, I so much want to be a sucessful writer. I’m under no illusion, I know it is a long and rocky road to success, but the first babystep is made and I feel ridiculously proud.

I always wanted to become a writer. I have all these ideas floating around in my head, and all my characters keep whispering to me to be let out to play. Especially at 3 am when I want to sleep. because I have to work early, but they don’t freaking care and keep nagging me.

I remember the first story I ever wrote, a fairy tale in classic style for school when I was 10, and I loved it. Best homework I was ever given. When a brandnew world opens up in your mind, with so many magical creatures and heroes and demons living in it, when the story cascades from your head onto the page, faster than you can write the words, that is the best feeling in the world. Even better than chocolate.

So I decided that is what want to do. I saved the money I made from delivering the weekly newspapers and bought a brandnew bright orange typewriter. That was many many moons ago, and in the meantime I wrote countless stories, bad poetry, good fanfictions, and even managed to publish a novel back in Germany.

But – and here is the problem – I knew nothing whatsoever about the actual publishing process, and how to make sure people find my book.

Well, after subscribing to writer’s pages and pages of successful authors, the one standing out message was simple: Build a Homepage, write a blog, and do all that before you publish your book. And there we are. Clueless me rambling on about stuff.

We will see how my Blogging will turn out. Fingers crossed, I didn’t scare you away already. If not, I hope to see you again soon.

Be safe

The Charme of cosy mysteries

What have Miss Marple, Agatha Raisin, Jessica Fletcher, Professor Peter Shandy, and Sarah Kelling in common? They all are despite the differences in era, occupation, age, and location amateur sleuths starring in their very own cosy mystery adventures.

By definition a cosy or cozy mystery as I found it spelled a lot is a sub-genre of crime fiction, where sex, violence, and cursing are kept to a minimum, and often happen off stage. The tone of cosies is in general light, comedic, and comforting. A fair few embrace supernatural elements like ghosts, witches, or fairies without gliding into too dark waters.

The main character is an amateur sleuth, and the action is centered around a small community, like a small town/village, a family clan, or a college campus. And of course besides swarms of red herrings you can find any sort of whimsical characters and bizarre traditions.

So, why are cozies so popular? For me personally it’s a mix of oddball but likeable characters, interesting scenery and the fact that the pace is normally leisurely without being boring. Something to like, to relax with and to revisit for the sake of your favourite characters, because you already know who the murderer is.

I like both the “normal ” and the paranormal type. A firm favourite of both my wife and me is “Murder she wrote” and we both like Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. While she enjoys MC Beaton’s Agatha Raisin I’m more partial to Charlotte MacLeod’s Boston- and Balaclava-Series with Sarah Kelling and respectively Professor Shandy sleuthing their way through New England of the 1980s. Father Brown is another favourite of ours. In fact, I come to like cozies so much that I will try to write one of my own.

The strange inspiration of a graveyard

I really like the typical english graveyard. Those old leaning headstones randomly scattered around the church, so very different from the graveyards I’m used to from Germany. There your “eternal” resting place gets rented to you for 20 or 30 years depending on soil structure and then the plot gets cleared and rented out to the next person. Everyone rests in orderly lines in neat squares, sharply edged off from their neighbours. Pretty boring really.

So when Rachel told me about the magnificent Seven I was all set to go. So off we trotted to Abney Park. I was stunned, firstly because we went on a really hot day, but mostly because they really had crammed them all in. Any German graveyard official would have screaming nightmares. Rows upon rows upon rows of graves almost stacked on top of each other, heavily overgrown with ivy, trees and weeds, Abney Park was very different from what I had expected. But – I liked it. Interesting, sometimes creepy memorials, lovely old trees, plenty of birds, you forget that you are in one of the busiest cities in the world.

Well, I did anyway. I was quite surprised at the amount of dogwalkers and made some four-legged friends.

But while I was busy snapping photos and petting dogs, my writer’s mind went its own way. It touched briefly on the obvious subject of ghost stories to the slightly less obvious dumping place for a body in a murder mystery, including, but not limited to murder behind a weeping Angel, before going into a family story. At some point my mind went completely off track. I blame the heat though.

Eventually we went home, me with plenty ideas in my head and pictures on my phone, both with the resolution to come back in cooler weather and take more pictures. Maybe even of arsenic mushrooms as they made themselves scarce this time.

I think Highgate is next.

Writing manuals – Help or Hindrance?

When you are good at doing something you’d think there is no harm in improving your abilities to get even better with it. And there are all sorts of tutorials or how to books available everywhere. Be it DIY tutorials, handy household hints, gardening advice or how to knit socks, there is something for everything under the sun, and a lot even for free.
So as a writer I’m always on the lookout for books and tips on writing since it can’t hurt to improve on the craft. And Amazon is packed with free books on that and also books in all price ranges. Some useful, others not so useful and some absolutely brilliant.
But how much improvement helps and when does it turn into hindrance or procrastination?
My first book was traditionally published and while not a bestseller it was doing reasonably well. My second book I Indie published and that one sits like lead. (Which turns out is a problem with my marketing or lack thereof. )
So, knowing my weaknesses I decided there is no harm in improving my abilities.
And as I said there are plenty books to that end. So for the last two years I’ve been forever attending webinars on writing and buying and reading countless books to that avail. And guess what? I’m mightily confused, because a lot of the books contradict each other, or aim at selling you yet another writing software (what’s wrong with open office anyway?) or useful gadget.
While doing all that I haven’t even written a single chapter in my planned novel, thinking that if I learned this bit first or plot that bit or emulate the style of I’ll be able to write the super novel in absolute record time.
But far from it. Uncertainty and madness lay this way and I found over studying has the opposite effect. Instead of finding my voice I lost it. So all my helpful books turned out to stand in my way of a finished product.
There were a few I found very helpful and those are the ones I’m sticking with now. Instead of reading a stack of books on writing I’ll get my bum in my seat and I promised myself to have a novella ready to publish by December. I can only improve on things I actually write, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m pretty good at being Diana, so that’s what I’m doing now. Being me, and relying on the fact that nobody can write my book the way I write it.

The difficulties with large print

My wife is low vision due to her diabetes and her cancer. She loves to relax with a book, but despite special reading glasses and a daylight lamp she can hardly read normal sized print. She loves cozy murder mysteries and period mysteries, and she also loves the Agatha Raisin books. But getting hold of them in large print is very difficult. Many books were never published in large print, and if they had, they are mostly second hand for an extortionate amount of money. One particular book she was after was supposed to cost over 40£ plus a horrendous amount of postage. Since I cannot see why postage for one book exceeds 50£ unless they deliver in person I strongly feel that that is taking advantage of someone’s disability. I love my wife dearly and I want her to have things she enjoys, but paying 90£ for a book is something I cannot afford and also something I cannot condone.

I am aware that large print is slightly dearer to produce, but surely it doesn’t cost that much more. Seeing that the same title as a paperback comes to under 5£ including postage, the mentioned price is outrageous.

I think there needs to be more availability for large print books. These days with print on demand it can’t be that difficult to offer the option of a large print.

Yes, the book needs a slightly different edit to accommodate the larger print to make it look alright and to get the spacing right, but still.

Should not be that much of a problem. At least this made me realise the need to offer more large print books, and I plan on having my next book available as a large print version. Even if Helen won’t read it, there are a little of people out there who might be glad to be able to enjoy a book without having to strain their eyes.

But it’s only fanfiction…

That is a sentence I did hear a lot during my high time of fanfiction writing. But is it really only fanfiction? Something to belittle and poke fun at? I don’t think so.

My little self, formerly known as Mr-Spock on fanfiction pages, see it as a form of entertainment. Sure, you won’t ever get any monetary reward for it, but it’s fun, it allows the reader to spend more quality time with their favourite character(s), always provided the author delivers on that quality.

In 2007, when I first got home Internet, I discovered the fabulous site of RickmanSnape.net with the fanfiction feedback forum. What a brilliant new discovery that was! For a few months I pretty much devoured every story uploaded there (which had to be approved by the webmaster PM each time, so they had to be of a certain standard), and after a while I thought I’d give it a go myself. My first one was about our favourite potions Master Snape and his old frienemy Lupin. (Yes, I wrote mostly Harry Potter fanfiction with a little bit of Star Trek thrown in for good measure.)

Now I can say it surely wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was the first piece I had written in a very long time and I was happy with it. From there on I went on writing and reading, and found myself a wonderful beta reader who really pushed for quality.

The clear advantage of writing fanfiction is obvious: You borrow already existing characters in an established world and throw them into different situations than the original author did. The beauty is you have already established settings to use, but you have to make sure to get the characters right, all the little details that make them special. (Or go straight for out of character and stick with it.) You learn a lot about writing. Writing well-rounded, three-dimensional characters, either with the original cast or introducing a character of your own without making it a MarySue.

You – or at least I did – learn the value of a good beta reader /editor to polish your story to be the best you could possibly write, how to deal with feedback whether it was positive or critical or plain trolls which sometimes happens. And what I definitely cultivated was the attitude towards my readers: To deliver the best reading experience possible, to respect them and the time they invest in reading one of my pieces. I learned the discipline to stick to writing a multi chapter story of 700+ pages in which I created a three-dimensional character to interact with the people from Rowling’s Hogwarts. I also learned about the dangers of the rabbit hole called research, or the dangers of falling asleep at my desk at 4 am and running late for work, because I just wanted to finish working on this one little chapter. I also learned the difference between writing what I really wanted to write about and writing for a specific audience which was not always necessarily the pairing I would normally prefer to write, but helped loads to get placed in competitions. And to be honest: I write and I do want people to read and like to read it, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Writing to the market is necessary if one hopes to make a living of writing which I hope to achieve.

So, only fanfiction?

No. Not only fanfiction. In my opinion a great way of practising your craft, with feedback from your readers and the chance of finding your style and your voice.

Thinking about it, I owe a lot to Harry Potter’s Professor Snape and the brilliant Alan Rickman who portrayed him so wonderful in the films, as well as to Minerva Mcgonagall and the great Dame Maggie Smith who brought her to life. They are brilliant to write.

Starting out with fanfics was a learning experience I really don’t want to miss.

Live long and prosper.

The Art – or pain – of editing

Well, I saw that post on Facebook the other day. First it made me smile, then it made me think.

I wondered how many times did I actually read my book between jotting down the first notes and the final version the editor eventually handed back to my publisher? I have no idea, but 75 times don’t seem unlikely. I’m not sure how other writers work, but every finished scene got transferred to my Kindle for proofreading at the next day. I marked all typos, story holes, everything I thought needed more work. That’s lunchbreak for you. And of an evening I sat, read, corrected, rewrote. I rewrote quite a bit, scrapped scenes, wrote new ones, stretched my time line from 6 weeks to six months because of plausibility.

I still can’t tell the several forms apart and frankly, I don’t really care if it is a line edit or proof read or something else entirely. I just know that I went over every page and every scene and every word so many times that in the end I didn’t like my book very much. So I let it rest for a few weeks before reading it again. Then I sent it out to people around me for another proofread, check on locations, check on character building etc. And then sat with everyone of my test readers to work through the manuscript before sending it off.

And after that the professional edit the my editor. So I read a lot of it again. Thinking about it, 75 times is probably not anywhere near enough.

But at least in the end I liked my book again.

For those interested, the book in question is called “Träume und Traumfrauen” and written in German and published under Diana S. Wirtz.

Available here:

Bravery vs the Absence of fear or how does being supportive work?

So, this week was packed with stuff. Monday I went all the way down to Cardiff and back to get Bob and Von here for the week. Tuesday Cancer centre with my wife, Wednesday and Thursday early shifts in bakery, Friday even earlier and for 9 to Oxford to the dentist with my wife for a pre-transplant check. Saturday I brought our Cardiff critters back home and today I was at work from 7 to 5. Dead on my feet now. But – when I wasn’t at work – I got time to spend with my favourite in-laws aka my wife’s brother and sis-in-law. And my wife got to see her family before she goes for her bone marrow transplant next month.

That’s a Big and Scary thing. I think she is brave, she says she is not.

There is a lot that can go wrong. Heavy chemotherapy to blast the old stemcells to bits, Rejection of the transplant, graft versus host disease, or simply an infection. Any infection. To put it bluntly: A simple snotty nose could kill her. Dr Bob said 60% of the patient survive the first 2 years. Sounds good at first, but then you think: 40% don’t make it. Then why take that risk when chemotherapy so far had helped? Because after 10 years of chemo it stopped working as it should. Because it’s the transplant or dying. Am I scared? Hell yes, I’m more scared than ever in my life. But – and here I went very wrong – in trying to be all strong and positive and supportive, I shut out the fact of how much could go wrong, and I didn’t admit how very scared I am. It made my wife feel like everyone just pacifies her and she is not allowed to be scared.

And Helen is scared. She would be weird if she wasn’t. She said she isn’t brave, because she is scared. She doesn’t feel brave because she doesn’t have a choice.

I say bravery doesn’t mean the absence of fear, but to do something despite being scared. And I think she made the brave choice. Instead of going on with the chemo for however long she might have left, she opted for the transplant. It could kill her, it could leave her with massive side effects and it can easily take 2 years to recover from the procedure even if everything goes to plan. So she chose the scary risky thing for a chance to live.

And despite everything she says I think she is very brave and plain amazing.

And eventually I understood that being supportive doesn’t just mean being positive, or going to appointments with her or informing myself about everything involved. It also means to be scared together, that being strong means to look the ugly things square in the eyes and acknowledge them. Admitting my own fears makes her able to tell me how scared she really is without feeling like a chicken.

Murder she thought – The dangers of research

Hello again. After watching yet another episode of “Murder she wrote” (and yes, I’ve been watching that for the past 30+ years, but still love it), I remembered two things. First, that the glasses I choose at age 14 because they looked like Jessica’s made me look ten years older and were not my wisest fashion choice in the book, and second, that research really is so so important.

But it also comes with the danger of getting trapped for hours reading up on stuff you don’t necessarily need but find too interesting to skip. Like today. I was searching for an article about arsenic laced mushrooms I read some time ago and remembered. I thought they would make a great murder method. So – tactical mistake – I put the words “arsenic”, “victorian”, and “mushroom” in the search bar. The results were not the article I was after, but I read about arsenic in wallpaper, exploding toilets, how victorian ladies managed lavatory visits with all their heavy clothing, arsenic make up, lead, lye and arsenic concoctions to rid themselves of unwanted facial hair ( The ladies of course. The gentlemen sported so much facial hair and sideburns unthinkable and probably forbidden outside the victorian era.)

In short, I fell down the Google trap and spent all afternoon reading articles about everything even remotely related to either arsenic or victorian time. I did find the article about the mushrooms in the end. I looked for the wrong cemetery. Abney park cemetery, not Highgate as I had thought. And not just arsenic from the embalming fluids, also lead from the lead-lined coffins the Victorians used. Makes those mushrooms even more interesting – and deadly.

And despite what my search history may indicate: I’m a writer, not a serial killer. Stay safe

Be careful – or you’ll end up in my novel

My stepdaughter gave me a notebook for my writing. Lovely dark blue with posh golden lettering on the front, saying “Be careful or you’ll end up in my novel”.

Oooookeeeeey. Well, they say write about what you know. Sometimes easier said than done. But thorough research does help with that.

But with characters I found in the past that it really helps to at least based them loosely on people I know. The photographer in my debut novel “Träume und Traumfrauen” I based on my best friend to make her a rounded character despite just being supporting cast. And when we had to put our dog Keefy to sleep I promised him I would write him into my next book. So I did. That’s him up there in the picture.

But that’s the positive side of it. When my store manager really annoyed me (as early as 5 am) I devised a motive, a method of murder and a complete plot around it by 5.30. Now I just have to write it down. Possibly NOT how people want to show up in a book.

So in conclusion :

Be careful, or you do end up in my novel.

Enjoy being my inspiration anyway.