I just finished reading Shatter the Sky – by far the most vibrant and interesting YA fantasy book I’ve read for years. It had the start of a love triangle, and that particular element was tedious but as it was the only real flaw with the text, I still had a great time. I then…

Abi Thorn bought up a really interesting metric on an interesting interview with Owen Jones recently: To paraphrase: If someone told you that you could never do X again, how would you feel? So, if you loved waterskiing, and someone told you that you could never do it again, you’d be sad, right? How about…

Last year, I wrote about how having depression made the release of my novel Three Arachnids In A Warship just another thursday. The short version is: depression saps the joy from everything. Even something as monumental as a book launch – the theoretical end point of years of effort – is rendered as nothing. Void.…

Having your work rejected is like having a tiny needle dug into your skin. It hurts, but not much. With my last few books, I took the shotgun approach to submissions, and sent out about forty submissions in the space of a month. That meant, when the rejections started coming in, it was like getting…

Agents, as we have previously established, agents get too many submissions to be able to properly assess them all. Estimations vary but from what I can gather, an agent at a good sized agency can recieve over a thousand submissions a month. This means that the odds of getting picked are very low, but it…

My Chronic Fatigue is in high gear at the moment, but I actually have a thing to talk about which I find really useful. So, I’m sorry if this blog post is coming across as confused, but I am extremely confused right now. Disability. I hate it. 10 minutes. That’s the thing we’re talking about…

I’ve submitted my latest book to four agents. I now can’t do anything with it for between 4 and 12 weeks. I need to distract myself by working on my next book and not worrying that I’ve misspelled something on the 15th page, but I’m supposed to be being vaccinated in an hour. I haven’t…

At the moment, I am doing three things: I am doing publicity for Not in My Name (due out March 20th) I am in discussions with my mentor and her boss as to whether my next book is ready to be sent out to agents I am doing pre-production for the book I plan to…

I’ve got a book coming out in March, which means I’m in the middle of a publicity blitz. This means doing facebook advertising and talking to a lot of people who do Blog Tours. There’s this big open question which everyone in the creative industries asks at some point – how do you find a…

“But wait… what is this washing at my feet? Why it is a pen! And a waterproof sack containing thousands of sheets of paper! And now a book entitled ‘How to Write a Novel’! Surely I am being told something… “’Chapter One. Stop reading this ‘How to Write a Novel’ book and start writing your…