In 2021, a 36-year-old author has been looking back on his career and considering the ups, the downs and the lessons learned. Was there a point to this? Yes, yes there was. Genre: Slice of Life How good do I think this experience was, looking back on it?     10/10 Actually taking stock of the books…

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week… Drown the Witch Susan Fletcher has been hired to infiltrate a secret society of witches. Her contact promises fame, fortune, and protection from the fallout. Now Susan’s contact is dead, murdered by one…

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week… Books that never made it to print: The Whispering of Black Anis Melody is an eighteen-year-old who slips into a deep depression, although she does not realise what is happening to her at…

Welcome back to Lessons Learned, my retrospective on my career thus far and the improvements I’ve made along the way. This week… Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid Meet Milligan Clodthorpe, a gentleman arachnid of exceptional lineage who finds himself involuntarily inhabiting the body of a human female. Bainbridge, the cad who now inhabits Milligan’s arachnid…

For reasons I don’t want to get into right now, I’m feeling in the mood to reflect back on my writing career: the highs, the lows and the lessons learned thus far. I’ll be talking about my books in the order they were released (or not, as the case may be), rather than the order…

As mentioned previously, authors are supposed to submit to agents in batches, rather than send out fifty submisisons in one caffiene-fueled weekend and then call it a day. Both approaches have their upsides and downsides, but I want to focus in on one particular upside I discovered yesterday. I’ve been doing submissions for a little…

The reason music and how it connects to writing is on my mind is it’s submission season. I say season. Unless things go spectacularly well, this ‘season’ is going to last maybe 18 months. So it’s a season of American television. A loosely connected series of episodes with enormous gaps placed at random depending on…

When I moved my latest book into the line editing stage, I pulled together six songs which I considered to be direct influences on the text. Here’s that playlist: I won’t go into the whys and hows of each track because it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense if you haven’t read the text.…

Racism is a topic that well meaning progressives, like myself, feel they need to address in their writing. It’s on my mind currently, because I’m reading the fourth Wayfarers book by Becky Chambers: Now, ths book (so far) seems to be mostly about culture clash. Different species are stuck in a closed environment together and…

Close line editing is one of the skills I’m working on at the moment. Going through a manuscript making sure all the verbs are working hard, you’re not overly relying on certain phrases, the sentence length is nice and varied… it’s a lot of work. I tend to get into zones with line editing. Today,…