Yesterday evening, I exported the first draft of The Amber Rooms – Saskia Brandt novel three – to my Kindle with a plan to read it quickly and establish how much work it needs prior to publication. I have, deliberately, committed myself to a 2012 publication date for the book. This gives me space to [...]
Like you do. Or rather, like I did. I’ve stopped going now because I was exceptionally poor at forming even the simplest sentences. Aliya Whiteley is – apart from being a great comedo-tagico-Ilfracombo novelista – studying for an MSc in Library and Information Management. As part of this, she interviewed me about the resources I [...]
My, hasn’t time flown? I sat down to update my blog this afternoon certain in the knowledge that my last entry was about a month ago. It turns out I published my retirement speech in mid August. I thought it would be worthwhile providing an update on my books. Several people have been kind enough [...]
What follows is a very personal post, for which I do not apologise.
A few minutes ago, I finished watching the final episode in this season’s Doctor Who, starring Matt Smith. A satisfying and clever end to a great story. The show is an interesting one from a dramatic standpoint: good fiction will usually chart the journey of a character along a line describing his development. There should [...]
What is a science fiction convention? It is a place for fans, writers, would-be writers and anybody else with an interest in science fiction to congregate and discuss the geeky details of their imagination. Yes, there are costumes. Yes, many of the fans are scientists. Nobody wore Spock ears, though I did look more like [...]
Roger Morris, guesting at Nik Perring’s blog, writes movingly on rejection: I’ve been writing all my life, and desperately trying to get published for over half of it. What this means is that I have been living with rejection for years. And years. And years. You know, when you spend so long living with something, [...]
The hilarity just doesn’t stop. Consequently, a typical writer apparently earns 33 per cent less than the national average wage. ► Literary Life – Telegraph via Jon Courtenay Grimwood
For this week’s Guardian Review, established authors were asked to produce ten writing ‘rules’. I agree with some of them and disagree with others. (For reasons best known to The Guardian, there is no web link at present for this feature, despite links to every other article in that section.) Update: James Viner points out [...]
Dani Shapiro on the ‘sell – or else’ mentality. If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they’d become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt. ► A writing career becomes harder to scale – latimes.com