Life does not get much better than … Today the sun shone. I had coffee with an agent (not my agent, not even remotely ever going to become my agent, because she deals with different territory, but a clever, witty woman who makes me laugh and makes me think), and picked up a little bit […]

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 Feb 1, 2007 in cover letter, submissions | 3 Comments

The cover letter conundrum What to include? How to write it? One year’s publishing credits or more than one year’s or no credits at all? Biographical information? It’s a bit of a minefield, and as we tread carefully with each submission, reading the guidelines, buying the back issues, sending within the open to submissions periods, […]

How was 2006 for you? In the spirit of transparency, here’s how it was for me – as a fiction writer, rather than as a fully rounded human being. Lots of wonderful, terrible, and mundane things happened to the human being, but this is simply the writer’s year: Submissions – 181 (112 still outstanding) Print […]

Posted by on Dec 8, 2006 in agents, novel writing, submissions | No Comments

What am I doing again? One of the biggest problems for any fiction writer is getting their head above the daily issues of making a living to fix on their long term ambitions. Most of us want to get a novel published. That desire has three concrete steps. Write novel Edit novel Send novel to […]