Posted by on Aug 29, 2009 in blogging, writing to deadlines | No Comments

Busy (not) doing nothing I hate people who don’t blog when they should, I really do. So I am abject about not having blogged, but I’ve just been too damned busy. So, I sent off my revisions, we’ll see what happens. Then a lovely (but demanding) client wanted a new blog and then another lovely […]

Posted by on Aug 21, 2009 in literary characters, names | 4 Comments

The Naming of Names This is going to be a long post and it’s only tangentially literary. We’re going to get a kitten! Blame Suw, the woman who is in feline servitude to Grabbity and Sir Isaac Mewton and who’s been twittering about them both. So, kitten. Our last cat died around January: she was […]

Posted by on Aug 18, 2009 in twitter, writing novels | 5 Comments

Good Writing Days and Bad Writing Days At the moment my writing companion is Twitter – I log on, use the #amwriting tag to tell people what I am aiming to achieve that day, and slog on with the task. If you’ve had a few days (or weeks, or months) off writing, it can be […]

Posted by on Aug 14, 2009 in Uncategorised | 5 Comments

Another reason writers should challenge themselves (aka, you may not be as rubbishy as you think) I am having a drought year. By this time last year I’d won a competition and been shortlisted for three more. And I’d been commissioned to write a story broadcast on national radio. This year. Nothing. Nada, zip and […]

Doing things that terrify you Once you become a writer, once you have a certain degree of ‘success’ (note the inverted commas, because they are important), you start to relax a bit. You begin to believe that you know where you’re going, that your writing muscles are going not only to get you through the […]

Researching novels – when and how I have quite a neurosis about researching novels. Actually I probably have two. The first is the fanatical introverted Type A personality neurosis about getting everything right. This involves months of reading around a subject, and – where possible – visiting locations, finding foods and fabrics that appear in […]

The Perils of Work-for-hire Writing I’ve been under the cosh for the past week – swine flu takes its toll of everyone, but if you’re a freelancer, and you can’t work, it’s particularly tough. One of the projects I’ve been trying to catch up on is a largish chunk of spec writing which, if I […]