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 […]
More swine flu, more writing, less fun every minuteSwine flu. Which I still don’t have. I have a headache and I have aching joints, but that’s probably because I’m doing a bit more than I should be post-operative wise, because there isn’t actually anybody else to do it when OH has swine flu. When you’re […]
Novel Review: The Mistress of Nothing Kate Pullinger’s novel, The Mistress of Nothing, is an historical work that has a number of layers. First there’s some historiography – the characters in the novel, by and large, were real people with a well-catalogued reality, like Lucie Duff Gordon, darling of Victorian intellectual society. Second, there’s an […]
From the troubled to the troublingHaving struck a chord with a lot of readers earlier this week, I’m going to probably alienate many of them right now. The How Publishing Really Works blog declared 17 July Anti-Plagiarism Day. Okay, I can see why. I do understand how galling it is to have work stolen and […]
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