D L Richardson

It's organ donation awareness week in Australia. Running from Sunday 24 February to Sunday 3 March, I'm going to run a giveaway of my latest novel "Feedback" for a full month.

About Donate Life Week:


Donate Life Week is a week where the public can discover facts about organ donation, decide on organ donation, and discuss their wishes with their family members. The discussion part is perhaps the most overlooked part. It wasn't until I began researching for my latest novel Feedback did I realise that whatever a person's wishes are, their family needs to know so they can make an informed decision when it really matters.

Now, before you do anything! just remember that organ donation is a personal choice. I totally respect people's personal beliefs. If a person has a religious, cultural, personal, moral, or ethical oppostion to organ donation, that's fine. This post may not be for you. but I won't object if you still wish to enter the giveaway. If you don…

I often write articles that relate to writing, and I often I tie these articles back to my books in a shameless attempt to self-promote (indie authors gotta do what we gotta do). But I rarely get to write about how I'm actually doing?

Well, thank you for asking, and I'm happy to say I'm doing splendid. And why wouldn't I be? In September 2011 my first novel The Bird With The Broken Wing was released through indie US publisher Etopia  Press. This news sent me leaping over the moon a few times. This was my dream come true. Little did I realise (or realize since my publisher is US) this was only the beginning.

The Bird With The Broken Wing came out as a standalone ebook and the first thing I learned was that ebooks are actually hard to sell. You don't just put things on Amazon and have them sell, just like you don't create a website and have people visit it, nor do you open a store and just have people travel hundreds of miles to buy something. You need to let peopl…

It's taken me a while to become a published author, and it's something I've wanted for ages. I was about 21 when I really decided I wanted to be a writer. There were many times I felt like banging my head against the wall because everything I wrote got rejected. Only in hindsight do I see that getting rejected was a good thing for me as a writer. It made me focus on getting better, learning the craft, gaining more experience. I can honestly say I'm a better writer in my forties than I was in my twenties.

This post is aimed at anyone who has the desire to become a writer. I wish there was a shortcut and I wish it was as simple as WikiHow makes it out to be, but it just isn't. Formal qualifications may help, but they still don't guarantee that you'll come up with that spark of any idea any sooner.

Anyway, these are just some of the things I've learned along the way, and they go a long way to explain why I wasn't published until a few years ago.

10 thing…

As an author of two YA speculative fiction novels, and with more on the way, I'm often searching for places to contact about reviews, interviews, guest posts, features, press releases etc.

During my recent search for science fiction blogs to promote my current novel Feedback, (or, in Sci Fi terms, making first contact) I came across a Top 100 list from 2009. That's an old list, although many of the blogs listed on that link are still active, and it can be annoying having to search through an old list only to find even older sites that are frozen in time.

Hey, now there's an idea for a story. Writer who investigates why SF bloggers suddenly stopped posting articles discovers the bloggers were abducted by a secret government agency because what they wrote about was coming true.

Seriously, lists come and go as no doubt this one will too. Here's a few pointers for anyone embarking on a journey into internet space:

SIGNS OF LIFE - There is no point sending anything to site tha…