futurelearn

I have recently completed a fantastic online course that I just had to recommend and share with you all. The course can be found here and it runs a few times per year online. I would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to start writing fiction (Clever name for the course, right?!).

The course runs for 8 weeks, but you can do as much or as little as you want at a time. The free option only gives you limited access to the course material, but there is a chance to upgrade for £42, which includes a certificate upon completion of the course. There are different mediums involved in the course and, by far my favourite element of the course, there are a couple of opportunities to have people critique your work. I found this really useful, if a little nerve-wracking at first. But everyone on the course was in the same boat, so it felt like equals/colleagues giving feedback on the work you’ve produced. It wasn’t like writing an essay at university and handing it in to the professor who knows everything about that subject. We were all in it together, and there were a lot of us! Some of us chose the same times to study, so I found that I crossed paths with the same people every so often. That was nice. I also got to give feedback on their work, which gave me a different perspective on writing and taught me to see other texts from a writer’s, and editor’s, viewpoint.

There are some great tasks throughout the course as well as videos and audio footage of established authors talking about how they work and offering helpful tips. You will learn about different aspects of writing but the course is mainly focused on character development. This is something I’ve never really started with when thinking of writing a story. I always begin with a plot (of sorts!) and the rest falls into place around that. This course taught me how to prioritise characters and then the plot can work around them. It was also really useful to hear successful authors talking about their processes, including Alex Garland and Louis De Bernieres.

I came out of the course feeling more confident, with the resources to help me formulate any kind of story by myself. There are documents you can save, including a prompt cloud which contains all sorts of random words to alleviate those writer’s blocks and give you some inspiration. Plus, you can download transcripts of the audio files by the published authors. I was so impressed with the content of this free course and I didn’t feel it was worth spending the money for the unlimited access and certificate, but that was just my choice!

Please, if you have any interest in starting to write your own stories, sign up at FutureLearn and, if there are other interests you’d rather pursue, then there may be other courses for you there, too!

Happy Learning!

NSG xxx

Hello followers! How are you all? I hope you’re having a good week, whether it is raining, windy, sunny, or all of the above.

It has been an interesting week in NSG Towers. Khaya turned a magnificent FOUR on Monday, and we took a rather brilliant trip to Hamley’s on Regent Street in order for him to choose his birthday present. We also promised Nathi an ‘unbirthday present’, which is a tradition in my family. Here are some of the highlights:

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We have also been busy seeing family, and making Baba Bear feel comfortable in his London home after being away for over a year.

Mama has been on a bit of a fundraising jolly, having raised over and above my goal for Ovacome through my birthday fundraiser. We now have an active family fundraiser for Comic Relief through JustGiving, which went live this evening. The boys took part in a cake sale at their nursery today, and we will all be tuning in to the Comic Relief live show on BBC1 tomorrow evening.

I was also very moved by the awful Ethiopian Airways plane crash this week. It was, quite frankly, way too close to home. Not only have we used that airline, and possibly that very aircraft, in the past, but my partner told me that he could have been on that flight if he’d decided to stay in Ethiopia a little longer for a work launch. He said that he would have flown any route to get him back to the UK that didn’t cost the earth, which very well may have included flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi for a connecting flight. I can’t imagine what the families of those poor victims are going through right now. My thoughts are with them.

I have ordered more merchandise for my company, just for me, and have been working on a business plan to find out what I can do next. What kind of journey will this venture take me on? I never saw myself as someone who would need to know anything about business, but perhaps this is what I was meant to do after all.

I am currently halfway through my amazing Start Writing Fiction course, which I signed up for through FutureLearn. It is free, and it is run by the Open University. I am really enjoying it, and am getting lots of interesting and useful guidance for my fiction writing. And, did I mention, IT’S FREE! I urge you to go to their site and see if there is a course for you. I bet there will be. Here you go: https://www.futurelearn.com/.

And now, we are gearing up for our friends at Two Gents’ production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Tara Arts Theatre in Earlsfield, SW18, which closes on Saturday night. If you’re local and fancy a night out, please book your tickets here. It’s a two-hander, both females, and should be a very interesting and entertaining night of theatre!

So, I hope everyone has a great weekend, and please donate anything you can to our Comic Relief fundraiser over on JustGiving. It all goes to the people who need it the most and, as much as I believe that this shouldn’t be how the world is in 2019, every little will help. Thank you, and goodnight.

NSG xxx

PS. I learned a little lesson in reblogging today, and how not to do it. I reposted a lovely post that I had enjoyed by another blogger on WordPress, but hadn’t made it clear enough that it wasn’t my own post… Needless to say, I had a concerned friend contact me by text about it, so immediately took it down again. Huge apologies to the blogger who wrote the original post – I am still learning!