Everyone who knows me will no doubt find this very funny. To be fair, I do too. I’m currently doing this author mentoring programme run by the brilliant Sophie Hannah and it involves a lot of positive thinking stuff. I’m rubbish at it. See? The thing is, I never wanted to be good at it. …
Spoilers, everywhere… I was, of course, up at some ridiculous time on Monday morning to watch the final episode. The Iron Throne. I already knew that I wasn’t going to regret starting to watch Game of Thrones, all the way back on March 30th this year. And that I certainly wasn’t going to regret watching …
tl;dr – Game of Thrones : it’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for me. There are spoilers for all except the last episode, so please consider yourselves warned. I wasn’t planning to write about Game of Thrones, partly because I came to it so late. I understand many people are very invested, having watched from …
Today is World Lupus Day. There’s a famous quotation from Flannery O’ Connor that sometimes floats past in meme form on my Facebook feed – “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.” Wrong. That’s lupus, which is possibly the only thing I have in …
Poems for World Lupus Day When I decided to do the Open University Creative Writing course, I was so intimidated by the idea of the poetry module that I phoned up the course team and asked if it was possible to complete without doing the poetry TMAs – and I allowed myself to be talked …
Why write at all? It’s hard work – the hardest work I’ve ever done. It’s not a way to earn a living. It’s hard to get published – and although self publishing is now an option that’s more hard stuff you have to learn and do or pay for… Yet lots of us do it. …
Be aware that this is long and chock full of spoilers. There’s no way to write about the stuff which interested me in the novel without them, and I couldn’t find a way of minimising them. Still, if you’re planning to read it and you’re the kind of person for whom spoilers actually spoil the …
I’m working on the second draft of my memoir/fictionalised autobiography – keeping to a straight forward chronological structure, from earliest memories until now. At the same time, I’m doing a lot of thinking about a better structure. One of the problems with my current linear approach is that the first twenty thousand words are in …
It’s hard to know when to give up, especially on a piece of work which has taken years, but I’ve reached that point with my second novel. Another rejection arrived today, and it confirmed a decision I’d already made. Compared with the first novel, it collected a lot of personalised rejections, with praise for my …
Yesterday I discovered my memoir piece, “If…” was shortlisted for the Fish Short Memoir Prize. I am so encouraged by this – for a couple of reasons. First, when I wrote it, I instinctively felt it was a piece of writing I could be proud of, and I submitted it unusually soon after I wrote …