Category: Blog
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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7th September 2012
Every end has a beginning When we started writing our contemporary adult novel in February this year, me and my co-author had quite a clear idea of how the novel would, or could, end, and we had a vague idea of how it would begin. We knew that our main concern would be the protagonist’s journey. We knew who the two…
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24th August 2012
Using locations for inspiration ~ a trip down memory lane A year or so ago, I started work on my second novel. Those of you who have read previous blog posts of mine will know that my first novel sits, alone and forlorn, in a drawer of my rather crammed writing cabinet, the writing cabinet that is…
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17th August 2012
Where is Grub? Many of you will know about the Ruby and Grub books (well, I hope so… I’d like to think you do), written by yours truly and illustrated by Sarah Warburton, some of whose work you can see here, and published by Piccadilly Press (@PiccadillyPress on Twitter) The series of three books, aimed at 2-6yrs,…
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3rd August 2012
Stop and Think time Yes, I am at that point, the two thirds of the way through the novel point… or rather, me and my co-writer are. We started our adult contemporary novel at the end of February this year, so have had five months working away at it. I had this vague idea in…