a little fantasy * a little sci fi * a little love
I'm still not even halfway looking back at my old notebook... But I'll make this my last musings on its contents. One thing that's surprised me straight away is that I originally was going to title the last in the Angel and Actors series novels, Drama Queens and Demonic Beings. So glad I didn't. There …
Continue reading "Looking back at my Writer’s Notebook – Part Four"
I filled my first writer's notebook. My friend, Brett, gave it to me as a present for my birthday over ten years ago. It also came with a lovely pen on which he engraved 'The pen is mightier than the sword'. Inside the notebook, he wrote an inscription of which some of the lines are: …
Continue reading "Looking back at my Writer’s Notebook – Part One"
Today's guest blogger is a bit of an enigma. We know Ari Meghlen's avatar from her Twitter site as she shares daily questions for us to consider under the hashtag #TheMerryWriter. She is working on several books yet hasn't been published. But she has flash fiction pieces on her website, as well as a wealth …
Do you round up your chapters or add a cliff hanger? This was a question posed by someone using the #writingcommunity hashtag on Twitter. My answer is that I initially rounded up chapters until an editor made me stop. Her reasoning was that if you round up your chapters into neatly self contained stories, then a …
One WIP has been submitted, one is on the back-burner and one I've just started plotting. I'm taking my time with this. With my other two works in progress I found I plotted too quickly, then went back and tried to expand them. One of them paces well, so I changed my mind and submitted …
Today's blog was sparked by a tweet from Kev St John (@Kev_away) He had given his work in progress to a Beta Reader who didn't like one character because she wasn't a good friend. He couldn't believe this response. This character is supposed to be a bad friend. That was the point. I had a …
I'm currently working on the second draft of my fantasy novel, Winter Masquerade. As I'm ironing out its shortcomings I'm finding the problems are the same as I originally faced with my first novel, Drama Queens with Love Scenes. At the moment my new work is novella length and I've been trying to find ways …
Continue reading "Everything old is new again, in my writing."
I have just finished editing the first draft of one of my works in progress. This story takes place on a fantasy cruise liner sailing on a chocolate ocean with a permanent rainbow sheet hanging from the sky. In it, Ferris wakes up on the boat, but he's from the real world. He has no …
These days, that's more that I usually do. But this manuscript is special. This story, The Midnight Man, took me a year to finally start as I was revisiting my earlier works for a new publisher at the time I came up with this story. And while I'm more efficient in my writing these days, …
Perhaps 'agonise' is too strong a word. You see, I've gone back to work on the fifth draft of The Midnight Man, a novel I need to get right. I haven't been this obsessed with perfection since my first book. It's currently novella length and tells the story of Stan, a middle aged man in an …
