#BlogTour-‘Motivation Matters’ by Wendy H Jones

About the book…

Has your motivation to write flown out of the window? Do feelings of self-doubt creep in and haunt your writing day? Looking for a way to beat the doubts into submission?

Award-winning author and writing coach Wendy H. Jones shows you how, with 366 glorious exercises you can use to boost creativity and change the way you think and feel about your writing.

Techniques that can easily be incorporated into your day, becoming part of your writing routine. It’s time to change the way you think and feel, in order to set your creativity free.

How can you not completely adore a book that says,’If your mind is telling you you’re not an artist,tell it to get stuffed’?

The answer is , you can’t! This book , I need to say, is not promising to make you a bestseller or handing the keys to the Booker Prize list to you, this is a manual which mixes mindfulness exercises, actual exercises and techniques which may seem pretty obvious, but when you say them out loud, they make total sense. As in a ‘why have I not tried this before?’ way.

Broken into 366 small exercises to tackle as and when you want, this is not an exhaustive ‘Start at page one’ read (although you could choose to work through it as such)‘Motivation Matters’ matters because it works!!

This is a pick n’ mix of tried and tested techniques ,wrapped around with chapter headings and summaries which are perfect for artists whether they write, draw or both (very rarely do people just create in one type of the arts, in my humble opinion)

Sage advice is given like being talked to by a close friend who sees you and also sees you. By that I mean that this has come from a place where the author has heard all the excuses-lack of time, poor working environment etc etc-because she has lived that reality and walked that path.

For example-

”You’re having a Giraffe

Stop!No need to run to the zoo.This is one of the cockney rhyming slang phrases for laugh. It’s time to do some laughing. Find a video on Youtube that makes you laugh.Watch two or three of these.What is it about them that inspired laughter?Watch the way lines are delivered,what the characters are doing,facial expressions, the nuances of language,the words used,the scenery and setting.Analyse which of these you find the funniest.Then work out how you can use this new found knowledge in your WIP or short story.”

In tapping into the small moments that make every day, and focussing on the little things, I found I was not overwhelmed with information, nor did I need a million pieces of equipment in order to carry out a lot of the exercises. I don’t write, creatively, but often struggle with expression, finising projects off, organisation and such because I am dyselxic. Often what I want to convey and what words I often don’t work well together. My fear of constantly mis-spelling things or ‘getting it wrong’ often stops me from trying, or editing what I write more closely. As a newly released into the world uni graduate, I struggled endlessly with academia and it has put me off, to the point of not recognising this, blogging, as writing.

What this book did for me was it took fear and made it into something I could use for my own purposes. I would thoroughly recommedn this to anyone who is struggling at the moment, with their writing, it absolutely opens up and explores your creative side in manageable chunks as well as helping you move along with whatever your Work In Progress (WIP) is.

Huge thanks to Kelly from LoveBooks Group Tours and Scot+Lawson for my gifed review copy!

About the author..

Award Winning Author Wendy H. Jones lives in Scotland, and her police procedural series featuring Detective Inspector Shona McKenzie, is set in the beautiful city of Dundee, Scotland.

Wendy has led a varied and adventurous life. Her love for adventure led to her joining the Royal Navy to undertake nurse training. After six years in the Navy, she joined the Army where she served as an Officer for a further 17 years. This took her all over the world including Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.

Much of her spare time is now spent travelling around the UK, and lands much further afield. As well as nursing Wendy also worked for many years in Academia. This led to publication in academic textbooks and journals.

‘Killer’s Countdown’ is her first novel and the first book in the Shona McKenzie Mystery series. ‘Killer’s Crew’ won the Books Go Social Book of the Year 2107. There are now six books in this series with ‘Killer’s Crypt’ being released in August 2017. ‘The Dagger’s Curse’ is the first book in The Fergus and Flora Mysteries for Young Adults. This book is currently shortlisted for the Woman Alive Magazine Readers Choice Award Book of the Year. She is also a highly successful marketer and she shares her methods in the book, Power Packed Book Marketing.

Links-https://amzn.to/2IsnOu2

Twitter @WendyHJones

@LoveBooksGroup