How to Blurb: Writing a book description that sells

A blurb can sometimes mean a short review quoted on a book cover, but in this post we’re going to look at the other kind of blurb: the book description. The blurb is your sales pitch, printed on the back of your book or quoted on its sales page online. It’s the second most important thing, after the cover, when it comes to selling your book. 

Musings on the Muse

My muse is a shapeshifter. She’s indiscriminate: a divine whore and angelic trickster up to her knees in mulch and butterfly cocoons. She’s in sunshine and dogs and fleeting thoughts and pain. She isn’t something other than me, but I can’t control her. She is my daemon, my guide. 

She would also like me to tell you that I don’t understand her and have no idea what I’m talking about. 

The Sun of Wisdom: Teachings of the Noble Nagarjuna

The Sun of Wisdom is a commentary on one of the classics of Buddhist literature by one of the great Tibetan masters, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso. Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way was written by Nagarjuna in the 2^nd century and is a commentary on the Buddha’s teachings on the nature of appearance and emptiness.

The Buddha prophesied that someone would come 400 years after his death to give a perfect explanation of his teachings, and Nagarjuna fulfilled the prophecy. Khenpo Rinpoche uses Nagarjuna’s text and modern master Ju Mipham’s commentary as a framework to explain and illustrate the most important verses. He deconstructs the ideas and shows how they apply to your everyday experience, and how you can put them into practise.

Monkey Magic! or How Buddhism came to China

To celebrate Chinese New Year and the Year of the Monkey, I thought it would be fun to explore the background to one of my favourite TV shows: Monkey. It’s a cult classic and was on TV during my formative years in the 70s. We would rush home from ballet class (don’t ask) because I couldn’t bear to miss it – this was before we got a video recorder and long before digital catch-up. I remember re-enacting scenes from the show in the playground at school, throwing myself off a bench and screaming, “Monkey!”

I grew up wanting to be Monkey, but didn’t realise how much impact that crazy show would have on my life. The Buddhist teachings got under my skin while I was busy enjoying the fights, the bad make-up and wobbly sets. It was only later that I discovered the story was based on the real-life adventures of Xuanzang, the monk who brought Buddhism to China during the Tang dynasty.

The Only Girl: the search for female sound engineers

Trina Shoemaker at the mixing desk

I was always odd, the resident freak or weirdo in any situation. And then I became a sound engineer. As a woman, that makes me exceptional. There aren’t many of us, so when I heard about Laura Marling’s latest project, Reversal of the Muse, I gave a cheer. It’s about time there were more ladies rocking a mixing desk.

Reversal of the Muse came about when the award winning singer-songwriter realised that in 10 years of making records she had only come across two female engineers working in studios. So she decided to dig deeper and explore female creativity in the music industry. Why are there so few female sound engineers and would the presence of more women in the studio make a difference to the end product – especially for female performers?

Gobekli Tepe: the temple rewriting history

Aerial view of the Gobekli Tepe site

The stone age temples dug into a hill near Sanliurfa in Turkey are causing a storm. It’s not often we find something that overturns everything we know, but Gobekli Tepe is a genuine mystery. Archaeology and history are being rewritten.

Alan Moore on the magic of fiction and the imagination

“I traffic in fiction. I do not traffic in lies.”

Alan Moore reminds me of an Old English Sheepdog with a wry twinkle in his eye. You just know he’s got a juicy bone hidden somewhere. He’s best known for his comics, like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and for the fact that he hates the movie versions with a passion. Hollywood, he says, “spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination.” Moore is an artist driven by the art rather than the market. A writer, storyteller, magician, rebel, iconoclast, and psychonaut, who like William Blake, believes the reality of imagination is paramount. Moore’s new novel, Jerusalem, is out later this year.

Fantasy Fiction: a genre distinction too far

I wrote a Fantasy novel by accident. That’s not an easy accident to have; not like tripping over your own feet or walking into a glass door. It’s not that I was trying to write something else and it turned into Fantasy. I wasn’t aiming for any genre in particular – I just wrote the story. It was only when I had to pitch the book to agents and publishers that the penny dropped. I worked down the list of literary genres looking for the best fit and ended up at Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Visionary Fiction: stories for growing minds

Visionary Fiction became a recognised fiction genre around the turn of the millennium, but stories using visionary elements have always existed. In fact, Visionary Fiction (VF) might be the oldest genre of storytelling.

The Heroine’s Journey with Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre (2011)

In storytelling, the Heroine’s Journey is structured the same way as the Hero’s Journey but the feminine experience of the story tends to differ from the standard masculine interpretation. It's the same basic myth but with a feminine twist.

The Hero’s Journey with Thor

Thor (2011)

There are many ways to structure your stories but one of the most common is The Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell identified this monomyth in his seminal book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, and it was later taken up by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey.

Getting the most out of Morning Pages

I’ve struggled with Morning Pages for years. I would do them for a bit and then quit. Start again. Quit again. Repeat. Then last week I finally worked out why: I understand the problem with Morning Pages and I know how to fix it.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Stopping

So we come to the end and it’s time to stop. 

To be creative means to recognise when you’re not being creative, and be able to do something to rectify that situation. To change and move forward you must stop whatever it is you’re doing (or not doing) that doesn’t serve either you or your creativity.

Stopping links all the other active qualities of the creative person, making it possible to leave behind unproductive behaviour and negative thoughts, opening the way to freedom through active creativity.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Learning

To be creative means to be open to life and curious about what’s going on and why. If you want to create something meaningful you must educate yourself: demand to know everything there is to know, whether about the world around you or the world inside you.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Looking

Look with more care than this...

To be creative you must pay attention to the world around you. Creativity is born out of an interest in life and other people. Turn your gaze outward. Search out the telling detail, ready for the moment the mask drops and the truth is revealed.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Rebelling

Stand out

True creativity happens right on the edge of rebellion, on the edge of chaos. This is where life functions at its best: at a point of dynamic equilibrium. Always changing, always transforming into something else.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Affirming

Be Yourself

Living creatively means being you. Who else are you going to be, if not yourself? Whose life are you going to live, if not your own?

Affirming means saying yes to being here and being alive. To be creative you must make manifest who you are through your creativity, and you do that by giving voice to your unique take on life.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Acting

Act on your desire...

To be creative you must act. Creativity is meaningless if it isn’t acted upon and made real. If you do nothing, you’ve got nothing.

You become what you do.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Encountering

Encountering means confronting life and yourself. 

This isn’t an aggressive confrontation with lots of bared teeth and frowning. It's non-demanding – more like an embrace. But not clinging, not a death grip. It’s about giving your creativity space to breathe, holding it in your mind and letting it be.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Committing

Commit before it's too late...

Committing to living creatively means you care. It’s an investment in yourself, in your future, in the process of creating, and in others.

You are entangled with your inspiration and passions, like two quarks linked across time and space, pulsing with the dance of life.