• 21st December 2012

    A Very Sunny Blog Post I’m delighted to say that my wee Musings & Mutterings (Previously known as my BOF – Blog on Friday) has been nominated for the ‘Sunshine Award’ (YAY!) and as I like sunshine and sunflowers, I am doubly happy to accept it. The Sunshine Award is ‘given and passed on to bloggers who positively…

    Read more: 21st December 2012

  • 11th December 2012

    A writer or a story maker? There’s a slight irony about the title of this week’s blog post, given that my now completed co-written novel is indeed called ‘The Story Maker’.  It’s easy at times, I think, to get submerged in all the writing malarkey that now exists, the marketing, the networking… and so on, and…

    Read more: 11th December 2012

  • 2nd December 2012

    SCBWI Dooby Dooooooooo I’ve done it! My first SCBWI conference. And I survived… yay, of course I did.  For those who don’t know, SCBWI is the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, referred to as ‘Scooby’ and run by a whole host of amazing people who put in hours and hours of work to…

    Read more: 2nd December 2012

  • 17th October 2012

    The Story Maker This has to be the most exciting blog post I have written yet (from my point of view) in the most excitable frame of mind, probably since the original conception of this story idea, back in February this year -my ‘2am moment’ – and its coinciding blog post. ‘The Story Maker’, co-written with…

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  • 26th October 2012

    Breaking my Blog and Blogging about my Break! I have decided to have a blog break for a while, and have been kind of putting off this post as I didn’t really want to.  After almost a year and a half of weekly blogging, breaking off from it felt like taking a step backwards somehow. …

    Read more: 26th October 2012

  • 12th October

    The Beastly Beast that is… the synopsis! Yes, I am currently at that point.  The novel is finished.  Oh yes!!!  So, what do I do with it now? Obviously, I had to write the synopsis.  I didn’t especially want to, so put it off for a bit.  Then I started and immediately it began to…

    Read more: 12th October

  • 5th October 2012

    Diary of an ending As I write, it’s 10pm, Wednesday eve, 3rd October.  I have just written the last word of my co-written adult novel WIP.  I wrote it accompanied by Ane Brun, ‘These Days’, which you can listen to here, a track which Dean Harkness (@Deanus on Twitter) posted on Facebook while I was in…

    Read more: 5th October 2012

  • 28th September 2012

    A Blade of Grass What is it that guides our choices as a writer? I don’t just mean regarding genre choice, I mean subject matter, theme, characterisation, dialogue, setting, the way we want our writing to feel, the tone.  Do we want it to be realistic and grounded or do we want to create something…

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  • 21st September 2012

    Some time in early July Fourteen years ago (and two months to be precise) I discovered I was pregnant.  It was early days so I hadn’t had a scan and had no idea at this point that I was carrying a wee little boy.  It was the beginning of something very special, but also the start of a very…

    Read more: 21st September 2012

  • 14th September 2012

    Little did he know… Last Saturday night, having completed chapter ‘4 from end’ of current adult novel WIP, I got stuck two paragraphs into chapter ‘3 from end’.  I sat up until gone midnight angsting.  In two hours I added one sentence.  I drank two whiskies… you do the maths!  I was getting nowhere so…

    Read more: 14th September 2012