Anne Woodland

       I read a lot, and since around 2014 the majority of what I've read has been in Ebook form. The great thing about the explosion of Ebooks and other forms of digital publication is that it's made getting your work seen a lot more accessible to writers. There are a number of authors who self-publish whose work I actively anticipate. In fact, I would say my current favorites publish this way.      However, I do think one problem that isn't properly recognized about self-publishing is that you don't always get as many eyes on your work in the early stages, which can lead to pitfalls like pattern writing. What do I mean by that? Well, I have examples.       There are two different writer's who've done fairytale retellings, which is a genre I really enjoy, particularly if they're doing one of the lesser known fairytales. After I read the first book by each of the authors, I quickly purchased their next one... and it was basically th...

    I was reading an ebook recently, whose title and author I have thankfully forgotten; the characters were complete crap and read like a fourteen year-old wannabe mean girl had developed them. The premise was vaguely interesting, hence me attempting to read it. Basically, the main guy character had been cursed and hadn't aged for around three hundred years. His pre-curse life was in the military or as a constable or something of that nature. Basically, the fact that he had arrested people who then languished in imprisonment came up (In his internal dialogue. This stuff wasn't even plot necessary!). However, this clearly uneducated person, and I mean that purely in the literal sense and not as an insult, said that he sent these people to "the gallows" before describing them wasting away in confinement and then finishing the paragraph with something to the effect of "and that didn't account for those that were hanged". I reread the whole paragraph just t...