Bashful Blagger

A blagger is bold and gets what they want by brashly saying things that are not always true. A bashful blagger is the same, but shy with it. Sounds weird? Well, yes: but that’s me, both a bold extravert and a shy introvert, only I tend to tell the truth, even in fiction. Here in the Bashful Blagger blog, I post boldly on my life as a sapphic author writing for a universal audience—anything to do with writing, publishing and marketing books—and rather more shyly on my real life. Happy reading!

The author with her inhouse editor, Chino

MarketingWriting

How to beat the Русский bots

Isn’t it great when a new comment comes in on your lovingly crafted blog? But when you look closer, what a sad disappointment it is to see it's in Cyrillic, crammed with links, and clearly dumped there by a Russian bot. So, how do you counter the spam bots flooding...

Im fluent in gobbledygook poster designed and sold by ramwebroom on RedBubble

Making SENSE of gobbledygook

Back when I was editor of eSense, a magazine-style newsletter published by SENSE, the society for English-language professionals based in the Netherlands, one of my colleagues posted a question...

CAPital pleaSURE or PUNishment?

One capital pleasure of my real life is the license my day job—English language editor for Dutch academics—gives me to goof off on Google. Or, to put it in terms the taxman will accept: the time...

Blurb your enthusiasm

Wouldn’t you love to get a blurb for your book as nice as the one Groucho Marx bestowed on Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge, by his fellow humorist  S.J. Perelman? Short, sweet, and killer conclusion....

Original art by Lillie Marshal @DrawingsOf.com

Fiction: fake or real?

Don't get me wrong. I’m not opening this post with a clever cartoon just because I love the artwork. Nor is it because I’m bratly comparing my sapphic tales (say hi to Philippa and Janice) to a...