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A new reality show?
Having watched the final of the amateur painting reality show ‘The Big Painting Challenge’ and being a fan of ‘The Great British Bake-off’, I wondered if it was time to have one on writing. Half an hour to compose a poem? 50 word flash fiction piece based on a trigger. A novel by the end…
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Building an audience
So we’re all out here in blogworld trying to communicate, yet there seems to be a chasm between those sites with a stellar audience and those with just a few dedicated followers. I’d be interested to know how you get your stuff out there. I’ve now read quite a number of on-line articles and they…
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A time to write
I haven’t posted anything for a week or so and I’d like to say it’s because I’ve had my head down redrafting my novel. But it isn’t. In fact, I don’t know where the time has gone. I was reading a post from an author a few days ago where she thought her idea of…
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What’s in a name?
I was recently listening to an interview with a well-known crime fiction writer in which she was complimented on her character’s names. She said she knew the area her characters inhabited so the names came to her quite naturally. Her words confirmed for me that authenticity isn’t just about the historical facts or geographical description but also…
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Back on track
A few posts ago I wrote of the impending disaster of arriving at my penultimate chapter with 40,000 words short on my target. Since then I’ve been back at the drawing board thinking, revisiting my plan and occasionally weeping. I also discovered that my chronology was all wrong, with weekends where there should be weekdays…
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Researching for a novel
I’ve just signed up for a session at Stratford Literary Festival, intriguingly entitled ‘The Gory Details: Researching for Crime Writing‘. I’ll be doing a reading and signing there of A Shadowed Livery the previous day so thought it would be good fun to look in on this one. Writing any kind of novel probably requires…
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Roadworks ahead
Several months ago I was extremely proud of myself. I’d finished my plan for another crime novel, with every strand of the story worked out and every scene, plot point and character woven into a whole. True, as the actual writing developed, things moved about, small holes appeared in the fabric, but nothing too serious. I…
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Sticky end
I’m musing over a villain I want to dispose of and can’t decide between a number of options. This bad guy isn’t the main one in the novel, though he’s caused quite a bit of trouble for our hero, a police inspector, let’s call him Henry,including kidnapping him and attempting to kill him.The options are:…
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How I found a publisher
This isn’t a ‘how to’ guide, I wish I had the trick, it’s just a quick run-down on how I went about the task and was lucky enough to be successful without too many false trails. There are 114 million results to ‘finding a publisher’ on Google, so there’s no shortage of advice. Try putting…
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Hitting the ceiling
I set myself a target last week of getting over the 40,000 word threshold by today. I hadn’t really far to go but was seeing it as a barrier though, strangely, didn’t actually notice the moment I passed it. This may have been because I’d set another wordcount target, just for the day, and was…
