Readers who rock and bi-polar editors Yes, as if you didn’t already know it, you’re a great bunch. Emails and comments, all advising and supporting me in my dilemma, have made the past few days a real joy. Perhaps it’s the isolation of writing for a living that makes such (relatively) small problems loom so […]

Posted by on Jan 25, 2008 in non-payment, problems with editors | 10 Comments

Ethical Dilemma Advise me, dear readers. You may remember that way back in December I posted about a journal that hadn’t paid me, despite signing a contract with me, and that I received a snippy email from the journal’s editor when I queried the non-payment, telling me that she had more important things to worry […]

Writing About Sex (taught by me!) Be it a work of erotic literature, or a scene in a murder mystery, writing about sex can be fraught with fear and inhibitions. Kay Sexton presents an intensive five session evening course on how to master the genres – from the simply sensual to the downright dirty! Kay […]

Where do you write? As regular readers will know, I have a horror of ritualisation. The habits and processes that writers use to gear themselves up to write must be useful, not damaging, and one of the most damaging I know of is the need to be in a certain place, at a certain time, […]

Posted by on Jan 15, 2008 in editors, literary magazines, rejection | 3 Comments

What a magazine editor owes a writer A fascinating debate has begun over at Kelly J Spitzer’s blog. If you’re one of the many writers who doubles as an editor, even ‘trebles’ as editor and copy-editor, as I do, then you do get to see this problem from a wide range of perspectives. One of […]

A world unlike any other That’s the world of the science fiction writer. And after a long silence, in which I’d actually said goodbye to two of my acceptances for last year, it’s a world that’s come to life again, as two anthologies that stalled seem to be back on the cards for me. Well, […]

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 […]

Habits – good and bad, and how to make them work for you as a writer Months ago I read Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer, and took note of her suggestion that a writer should write for half an hour first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, brushing their teeth or having […]