This blog post marks a major achievement in my writing. At the beginning of the year, I joined the Get Your Words Out online community of writers. In order to sign up, you have to pledge to write a certain number of words over the course of the year. They also have to be certain […]
Category: Blog
Distracted by the Shinies
I’m supposed to be finishing a final polish of the novel, ready to send it to Cornerstones for a professional edit report. My deadline for doing that, set by my wonderful husband who is paying for report as my birthday present, was 2 November. But it’s now nearly three weeks later and I’m only halfway […]
Helping the Crew
I was recently introduced to an interesting way of thinking about the conscious and subconscious parts of the mind, which I’ve found very helpful in working on my writing. Think of the mind as a ship, with the captain steering and looking out to the horizon, and the crew working away below decks, out of […]
Major Milestone
I am learning the inevitable lesson that life as a writer, and interaction with the publishing industry in particular, is unpredictable and sometimes frustrating. There were a couple of months over the summer where everything suddenly felt as if it was coming together. Four of my short stories were accepted for publication, I was offered […]
Under The Microscope
In this month’s Writing Magazine, author James McCreet analysed the first 300 words of my novel, doing a line-by-line commentary and providing a summary overview of his thoughts, as well as a suggested re-write. When I first heard that this was going to happen (so many months after submitting that I’d forgotten all about it), […]
My Writing Day
Write every day – that’s what we’re told, isn’t it? It’s the only way to cultivate good writing discipline, and train your mind to see every day as a writing day, no matter what. Well, in order to hit a self-imposed target of 100,000 words written in the first half of 2016, I ended up […]
The Benefits of Forced Focus
Writing is a tricky business. It’s the thing I most want to do with my time, and it’s the thing I least want to do with my time. This seems to be true of all the writers I know. We desperately want to create amazing things – and in fact can’t imagine life without writing […]
How It All Began
Way back in October 2010, I signed up for an Open University creative writing course, with a good friend of mine, who is also a writer. The very first assignment was to write a 1500 word short story, on any theme. The idea for my story came from a conversation I had with my husband […]