Following up with Flosca Teo. A few months ago I interviewed the collective of writers that makes up Flosca Teo, and highlighted their rather unusual competitions – recently I got back in touch with them to find out how things were going … In the couple of months since you launched Flosca Teo and particularly […]

Posted by on Sep 25, 2007 in meme | One Comment

Charles Lambert – http://charles-lambert.blogspot.com/– did this to me: “Each player starts with eight random facts/habits or embarrassing things about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list […]

Strategy (and tactics) for fiction writers I spend a lot of time coaxing (and coaching) writers into becoming prolific submitters of work (which, of course, requires them to be prolific writers – a useful by-product) and use my own record as an example of what a half-way competent but commited writer can achieve. This is […]

An Evening of New Writing Well, it went marvellously, though I say so myself. Actually I knew it would, because Alayna Munce’s book, When I Was Young And In My Prime, is beautiful, strong, poetic and resonant and Maria Jastztrebska is one of my favourite poets, not just because I like her poetry, but because […]

Synchronicity A few days ago I reviewed Brian Aldiss’s excellent ‘Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s’ on this blog. This morning my subscriber copy of The Frogmore Papers arrived and I see that Mr Aldiss has a short stoy in it! Not only that, but a story which – on skimming – relates to […]

Posted by on Sep 12, 2007 in agents, novel writing | 6 Comments

Requested Material There can’t actually be many happier words that a writer can write. The End is good, but Requested Material is better. It’s what you put on the outside of your parcel when you send your manuscript off to an agent who has asked to read it. Yes.Again. No. I’m not saying which agent. […]

Posted by on Sep 6, 2007 in novel writing | 7 Comments

Over the hill I’m forty-five today. My grandmother is still going strong at ninety-six (well, she’s completely gaga mentally – but physically going strong) and my great-grandmother made it into her nineties with a glass eye and a love of the horses that made her the spitting image of the gradma in the Giles cartoons, […]

Bury my Heart at W.H.Smith’s I made a pact with myself this year that I would read one book on writing a month. It might be a craft book or an autobiography, but I would plough through it. So far I’ve had three good months of the eight, and the first was cheating because I […]