This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
Day 5 - Your Target Audience It's Day 5 of NaNoWriMo, and I'm still keeping my word count on target. Ok, so I didn't do well yesterday, but I made up for it today so I'm still on track to finish on the 30th November. So...your target audience... From Pexels You want people to like your writing, don't you? Everyone likes different types of writing but, fortunately for us authors, readers tend to fall into categories. These could be age related (middle grade or young adult) or genre related (fantasy or romance). Because readers tend to conform to one of many groups, it makes writing for them a lot easier. If you're writing a romance novel, you should know that people who enjoy reading romance books will be expecting a happy ending, at least for our star couple. If you don't give the reader what they are wanting, this could end in dissatisfied customers or bad reviews. When you're writing, think about who you'd like to read your book...