This is another emergency blog post that I’m writing well in advance because my health is being particularly terrible at the moment. This is about the sentiment that I shouldn’t give up on writing because I’m not getting anywhere. I’ve written a bunch of books and submitted a load to agents. None have got anywhere.…

One thing I’m still trying to get a handle on is when to disregard an editor’s advice. For my last book, someone recommended that I start the story in the backstory of the characters, which I disregarded because the backstory has nothing really to do with the story. In the two years since that advice,…

Spent large parts of this week in hospital so not getting masses of writing done. Did have a chat with my editor where we worked through some issues with a book. It’s lovely to talk to editors over Skype. Mostly I talk to them over email but you lose so much energy and potential for…

Still unbelievably tired. Am on the waiting list for a sleep study but a decade of the Conservative Party stripping funding away from the health service combined with Covid means I have no idea when the study will actually happen. I’m still having fun on my writing course. here’s a fun titbit I learned: When…

This is my emergency blog post for when I can’t even write blogs because my health is being a problem. So, this is the best way I can explain what having Chronic Fatigue is like. When I try to read a book and my Chronic Fatigue is acting up, this is sort of what happens…

The world’s quickest entry today, because I’m tired and don’t really have a lot to say. However, I’ve come across a piece of advice which seems really useful – avoid emotion words when trying to establish a character’s emotional state. I.E. Don’t write ‘I was scared’ – write how the fear manifests. The feeling in…

I’m going to be taking part in an editing course in October because that’s one of many areas of my writing that still needs to improve after however many years I’ve been doing this thing. The course sent over a reading list, and part of that was the book written by the two people who…

I’m part of a facebook group where writers and editors discuss various technical and business issues. Recently, someone on this group posted an article talking about a subject that always gets my teeth grinding: How quickly should a novel’s plot kick in? The TL;DR of the article was: It used to be a novel could…

On the 23rd of July I wrote about my editor telling me that there was a flaw in my writing. Through a long and bloody process, I found out what that flaw was: My writing, particularly in the early chapters, didn’t have a Sense of Place. For those that don’t know, a Sense of Place…

I finished up my edits two days ago. It felt like letting out a breath I’d been holding for nearly a month. It felt like racing for a finish line that only existed in my head and where no-one was competing against me, but I still felt compelled to race. Yesterday I crashed, hard. Part…