Fi Phillips

Creating quality images for my blog posts and website has always been a bit hit and miss for me, so when a friend introduced me to Canva I was delighted. Canva is a "free graphic design tool website". You can create all kind of  graphics on there, such as social media images, letterhead, certificates, books covers, and marketing flyers. What's more, it also provides royalty free images and photographs for no charge, along with shapes, frames, layouts, fonts and backgrounds. Having said that, if you can't find exactly what you want then you can pay for additional items. Of course, you can always upload your own images, which is what I've mostly done. There are a lot of Canva tutorials  available, both on the website and posted online by users too, but I found Canva easy to pick up with a little trial and error. So far, I've created images for Pinterest, photo galleries, email headers, and blog posts, along with my 2017 vision board. It's fre...

When the Who Do You Think You Are magazine gave me the opportunity to review Watling Street by John Higgs , I jumped at the chance. British history, especially history from the point of view of the people, has always been one of my favourite topics to read. Add to that, the chance to get a free book and what's not to like? I initially received a paperback proof copy of the novel  but a few weeks later, courtesy of Higgs' publisher Orion Books, a beautiful hardback copy arrived too, this time full of maps and photographs that hadn't figured in the proof copy. The colourful cover perfectly captures the contents of this book with its witty combination of the past, national identity and more recent pop culture (the Tardis is my personal favourite). According to the accompanying press release, Watling Street is a road of witches and ghosts, of queens and highwaymen, of history and myth, of Chaucer, Dickens and James Bond. Armies from Rome arrived and straightened th...

I haven't posted photo inspiration for a few months now (sorry about that) so I thought I'd return to it with a summer shot. This is a seaside telescope, all ready for someone to pop in a coin and have a look. Who do you think might use this? Are they alone? What are they looking for? What do they see through the lens?

I'm on the countdown to the school summer holidays and I know that once my two are at home all day, my writing time will be eaten into by trips out and requests for food, drinks or to watch one of their latest animations or memes. So advice on how to keep writing thoughout those six weeks is always welcome. Julia Munroe Martin's article on Writer unBoxed, Survival Pack or How to Keep Writing No Matter What is ideal. And just as a little extra for you this month, Em Lynas' article Who Is Driving Your Story? is well worth a read. Have a look.

Yes, you've guessed it. July is going to be another busy month for me, doubly so because my children's summer break begins towards the end of this month - argh! Murdering The Text The June target was to complete all the changes to the Murdering The Text website before July started. Did I do that? No! To be fair, I got a lot of the changes finished but two things happened to stall my progress. One, as I made the changes, I thought of better ways to improve the website so the planned changes took longer. Two, I came up with more changes to make. They're all good ideas but they'll take extra time to put into place. So the 'new' plan is to finish the changes to the website before school breaks up for the summer. There's a slight complicating factor though - I've come up with a new marketing plan for the website. I want to start it right now but I know that I need the website to be as good as it can be before I begin to attract new peeps to i...