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Great review
Great review of A Shadowed Livery today at nonstopreaderbooks.blogspot.co.uk – so nice to hear.
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Why do they do it?
Afraid this is just a rant – no insights into my writing habits in this one. A couple of hours ago I received a Whatsapp message from a friend warning me that the service is going to start charging from this weekend. I had a pretty good inkling that it was probably just a scam…
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Learning from others
This weekend I attended the excellent Ennis Book Club Festival in County Clare and was treated to the thoughts of a number of writers. I attended sessions with Carol Drinkwater, Donal Ryan, John Boyne and Anne Enright, amongst others and it was fascinating to hear their insights on the writing process. What was clear from…
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Can writer’s block be selective?
“It’s no good”, “Stop, you fool”, “Who told you that you were a writer?” they shout. Unfortunately I’ve started listening.
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Going off on one …
There’s always a tension in writing between enjoying the process and hitting a deadline, even if that deadline is self-imposed. I’ve written before in this blog that I’m a planner; I like to have the skeleton of the story and an outline of characters in place before I put metaphorical pen to paper. In my…
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Did you kiss the dead body? – Situation development
I recently came upon a poem Death by Harold Pinter which apart from being brilliant in its own own right is also, in my opinion, an excellent framework for developing plot. Just the sort of questions we should be asking about any character or situation in our writing, not just the dead body of Pinter’s work.…
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So much talent
Last weekend I had the enjoyable experience of attending a number of sessions at the Allingham Festival, a now-annual event in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, honouring William Allingham. On Saturday, a literary lunch, with poetry for dessert, was followed by a discussion between local writers and the Irish Writers Centre. We then moved on to the keynote…
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Elementary my dear Watson
I’ve recently returned from a long holiday in France and whilst I did do some writing (honest) a lot of my time was spent reading. I’d loaded my Kindle with a mix of material but I set myself a goal in the first few days of getting through an anthology of the complete collection of…
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Why can’t they get it right?
As an author of crime fiction I strive for accuracy and continuity. Now, I may not always get it right but at least I try. As a result, both a blessing and a curse, I notice flaws in other people’s work, particularly on TV. Sometimes it’s just the easy ones, the result of editing or…
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The joy (?) of being an author
I’ve had my head down for weeks, so apart from five hours a day wasting time on my newly discovered Twitter (@charliegarratt3), I’ve been redrafting the novel, working title: Let Venom Breed. Back at the end of June I was in the mire, still 20k words short of target and lost down narrative arc alley.…
