Home page

Welcome to Jane Dougherty’s site. You will find posts about writing in general, my writing in particular, and random notes about where I live, and my animals and other family.
Thanks for dropping in.

As of October 27 2020 my first chapbook of poetry thicker than water is available from most Amazon sites. My second poetry collection, birds and other feathers, followed on November 27 2020.

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250 thoughts on “Home page”

  1. Hello Jane,

    My mom just sent me two books of yours, looking forward to reading them. Been to Donegal recently looking for ghosts.

    Scott

    Reply

  3. hey Jane, thanks for dropping by my place. your updated site looks great, how did your last novel go? I’ve been away a while- but my heads buzzing with the Ernest cline books I’ve just completed reading. – as you see i’m trying to carry his 80s journey on.

    Reply

    1. I sometimes feel I’m still living in the 80s. I don’t much like the world of 2015. I’ll try and read a few more of your posts. WordPress had a hissy fit a few months ago and I had to reset all my notifications again one at a time. It still doesn’t work for some of them. The trilogy is complete and I’m pleased with it. Just waiting for the New York Times to notice me 🙂

      Reply

  5. This is just a short note to let you know that my entry for Day #1 of the Three Days, Three Quotes Challenge (https://rivrvlogr.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/day-one-of-the-three-day-three-quotes-challenge/) does not include your name as a nominee for the challenge, contrary to the specific rule to nominate three bloggers. 😉
    Instead, I’ve pointed readers in the direction of three of my favorite poets here at WordPress. Needless to say, you are one of them.

    Reply

  6. Hey there, Jane! You were one of the four Heroes of Awesomeness at the 2015 Two-Sentence Story Challenge!
    There’s a cute button waiting for you ^_^
    Thank you for participating!

    Reply

  7. Hi Jane, just to let you know..I have named you on my blog as a woman blogger who inspires me as part of a response to a challenge called “GirlLove”. Nothing required from you 🙂

    Reply

  8. just wanted to say that when i just try to check out or recent posts, my browser throws up a red screen and says deceptive site ahead and won’t let me check it the posts

    Reply

    1. Somebody else told me that. You have to click on the button at the bottom of the warning message that says you’re ignoring the warning. There ought to be a message box pop up that you send to Google to tell them there’s nothing wrong with the site.

      Reply

  14. Hi Jane! Jane (Lady Nyo) here. I’m late to your blog but it’s very intriguing! I, too, am a novelist…fell into poetry by accident…I’m published in a few months….”Kimono” a time warp novel from 21st century Japan to late 17th century Japan. Tengus, evil kamis, etc. LOL! Would like to talk to you by email about your own novels and your process of writing. I have 4 novels, unpublished but 6 books of published poetry. LOL! Totally backward from what I started out to do. Being a novelist is so different than a poet, but perhaps not. It’s just that many don’t know about the novels and expect poetry. I love the task of listening to my characters. People don’t believe me, but the characters do the heavy lifting…they write the books….I’m just the scribe. LOL! Please write to me and tell me your own process. I am friends with a very few novelists…it seems that our world is quite different in scope.

    Jane (janebartels3@bellsouth.net)

    Reply
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  18. Hi Jane, I don’t usually read much on WP because I keep my site more as a public diary of art, but I started reading Security Alert and I really like it. I’m going to finish it and maybe I’ll be looking for your books online. Hope you are well and keep writing. 🙂 Best, ks

    Reply

    1. Thanks so much! I’d love for you to be able to get hold of The Green Woman books. They were self-published and the publisher of my other fantasy trilogy asked if I’d let them have the series. I took the whole lot down from Amazon, including all the short stories as requested, even did a first round of edits, then the parent company pulled the plug on issuing new contracts. I lost all the reviews when I took the books down, and haven’t had the heart to start again from scratch. I have a couple of short story collections on Amazon though, unrelated to The Green Woman. One day I’ll do something about republishing.

      Reply

      1. omg Jane I’m so sorry, that sounds devastating. Did you think it was worthwhile to publish them through your other publisher rather than self-publish? Since I work in publishing (educational) I’m pretty jaundiced regarding publishers. I have a novel that I’m going to finish at some point and I plan just to self-publish. I have friends who published with real publishers and it did them little good monetarily. The only thing I suppose it did for them was to “validate” them that they had been published by a certain publishing house (and then ignored!)

      2. I knew I wasn’t going to spend any money on promotion and without constant paid ads, books just slump to the bottom of the pond and die. My publisher had just paid for a Bookbub feature for the first of my books with them, and it sold really well. It’s the kind of thing I can’t do, but a publisher can and should do. I thought it was worth a chance. Wrong.

      3. sigh. It’s too bad you didn’t have the contracts signed with the publisher before you pulled the books from amazon. Although as you say, if you couldn’t continue to do promotion, maybe they would have slumped. Have you thought of trying to keep a science fiction blog or join science fiction collectives to gain visibility? I guess joining science fiction reader groups on goodreads might help too. Unfortunately, even authors published with the big publishers are tasked with doing a fair amount of their own publicity (especially the smaller authors).

      4. It was part of the deal—I had to take down all the books and related stories before they issued the contract. Goodreads baffles me to be honest. I don’t get how it works. You’re right about authors having to take on some of the promotion. That’s logical. But not the marketing. That’s what the publisher is for, and to set up promotions. The author takes part in what the publisher organises, but if it’s up to the author to pay for the ads, book blog tours and do giveaways, she may as well do the whole thing and keep all the benefits.

    1. Missed that one. I’m sick of Outlook playing fast and loose with my mails. It sorts them into three different boxes for no reason I can fathom, and empties the spam box after ten days. I have to scroll through the lot several times a day.

      Reply

      2. Hello! I remember when you came to Fieldhead with your mother. He was a lovely man and I’m proud to be his daughter. He had a great deal of affection for you and for Scott who seems to have inherited something from a common ancestor, the poetry and the wood carving. It’s good to hear from you!

  23. Hi Jane I don’t seem to be getting any posts from you. Are you on strike. I miss your beautiful poems. I am going to check my spam to see if you are trapped . I am still following you. Hope you are well. 💜💜

    Reply

    1. Hello! I’m still here and surviving. I don’t get notifications from you either. Sometimes one pops up in the ‘other’ second class mail box. I’ll check the settings. WordPress mucks about with them.

      Reply

      1. Hi I looked in my spam and you are not there so I shall unfollow you and re follow and hope that that rectifies the situation 💜

      2. Did you check the settings? I stopped getting notifications from someone I have been following for years, found notifications were switched off, so I switched them back on. Now I get TWO notifications of each post!

  24. I’ve truly and honest enjoyed,

    reading an stealing your work,

    throughout those years

    in which learned too,

    improve my writing skills

    through following you!

    😉

    toad…………

    Reply
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  30. Dear Jane, I’ve been reading your amazing writing for sometime. It’s always a joy. I never made my way to your about page until now. I didn’t realize that you are Irish ☘️! Always Thought of you as British. I find few Irish blogs ar WP. congratulations on your achievements. ❤️

    Reply

    1. Thank you, Holly! I was brought up in the north of England in a very Irish environment. The Irish were still pretty much second class citizens and we stuck together. My parents generation had a great belief in the power of education and our schools were the best in the county. If you want to join them, you have to beat them 🙂

      Reply

      1. I come from a long line of Irish immigrants ( and Wales) dating back to 1700. You can take the girl out if Ireland but you can’t take the Irish out if the girl ! 🤗

      2. Do you know anything about your ancestors? The majority of the Irish who went to America at that time weren’t migrants but slaves. We tend to forget… Not the Welsh though, they were part of the establishment 🙂

      3. So true Jane, the Irish were treated with disdain by the English, they were abused and even tortured and murdered as interlopers. I think the movie Gangs of New York is quite accurate in telling the story of the treatment of The Irish immigrants, mostly fleeing the potato famine . My ancestors on mother’s side were Irish , my father Welsh. We also had some Scots in there. 😊

      4. I read somewhere that until the sugar triangle became really well established, Irish were considered much more economical as slaves. They cost very little as there was an almost limitless supply and could be rounded up and shipped across the Atlantic without having to buy them from slavers first.
        You didn’t have to have committed a crime to be transported to the colonies, just homeless and starving. So, while we’re talking about blame and paying reparations…
        Not that I am. It’s the way we treat one another now that matters not what our ancestors did.

      5. I sometimes think about the ways different ethnic groups have been mistreated and used. I can hardly think of any that haven’t been at one point in time or another. Actually it was the Italian immigrants that held the Irish down when they arrived in the “new world”. Always fearful of what we don’t know and of course Afraid of losing what we have to new comers. Human nature can be cruel.

      8. It didn’t stop them being top ethnic origin though, did it? WASP—Anglo-Saxon is English and only English 🙂 Strange really. I suppose the Americans who must have been majority English origin at that time, just sent the soldiers home, no hard feelings.

      9. That’s very true. The Pioneers had a tenaciousness the Kings men didn’t have. Next time they came through Ellis Island like all good refugees.

    1. Hilary Mantel is the exception that proves the rule that publishers rarely take on huge canvas big-scale works written in grown up English that don’t pander to the goldfish attention span readers.
      She has a masterly grasp on the language and on setting. She writes long, difficult sentences and has so many characters few people can keep track of them all even with a list of characters to crib from. It’s true she was already an established writer when she started on Cromwell, and maybe if she hadn’t already proved her ‘worth’ no publisher would have looked at Wolf Hall. It ought to give me hope that intelligent writing still has a chance, but somehow it just depresses me even more. I’m nowhere near as good as Mantel and have none of her credentials.

      Reply

      2. You should know by now I’m the worlds biggest pessimist 🙂 I like reading intelligent stuff about writing. She isn’t pretentious and she’s damn good.

    1. Thank you! The e-book is what’s up already on amazon and is available from tomorrow. I have to approve the proof of the print version but hope to receive the proof copy tomorrow.

      Reply

  34. Hello Jane,
    I posted to my blog the first part of a long poem that I had written about seven months back. Appreciate you reading and let me know your comments. I value your comments a lot.
    Pranab

    Reply

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