Janathon Day 18 – the miraculous properties of new kit As a writer I know the power of the new notebook – sometimes beneficent, sometimes malign. A fresh notebook can spark a new project, or condemn a writer to the blank white shyness of the empty page through writer’s block. For me it’s always the […]

What stops you writing? If you’d asked me at the end of last year, I’d have said ‘nothing’. Rather smugly in fact. I would have pointed to the times my computer fritzed out, my internet connection disappeared, I found myself in foreign places with nothing but scrap paper and pencil ends, and still wrote. How […]

Posted by on Apr 24, 2007 in inspiration, journal, writer's block | 3 Comments

Not the Primrose Path As Shakespeare has it,“I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,As watchman to my heart.But, good my brother,Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,And recks not his own rede.” Not, […]

Posted by on Nov 21, 2006 in nanowrimo, novel writing, writer's block | 2 Comments

The value of compression Writing a novel in a month is a daft thing to do. It’s a lot of fun and it teaches you a great deal about the process of writing a novel which comes in useful when you step back to write a real novel in a sensible time-frame, but it’s an […]