There are a lot of questions lately about where all the working class writers are; I am here. I was born in a deprived area to parents who worked in factory and trade jobs and who had not attended university. They lived with relatives in the 1960s and saved for a house deposit. When I […]
Now January is over and done I’m starting to look forward to 2018 even more. In case I hadn’t mentioned it, I have a novel out this year! Perfect Ten will be published on the 6th September 2018. As you can imagine, this is very exciting for me, and I’m going to start at the […]
Last weekend I spent three days at Whalley Abbey in Blackburn, Lancashire with Scriptwriting North. Fourteen of us arrived fresh for writing, table reads and some lovely food. But what we got was much, much more. We started with a workshop in character, which was very useful, particularly when it got practical. I mapped out […]
I’m not the first to write about this subject and I won’t be the last, but watching Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro debate genre fiction piqued my interest in genre boundaries. They both noted during the interview that they felt that genre boundaries are disappearing and are outdated. Recently an author on Twitter or Facebook […]
I never could have imagined how opening books as a child would have an effect on the rest of my life. Long before I heard of Tolkien’s Hobbit, I went hand in hand with Alan Garner’s Colin and Susan to Alderley Edge in the pages of The Weirdstone of Brisinghamen. I would have been about […]
It’s the start of a new year and I woke up on the 1st of January to find out that Random Acts of Unkindness was in the Australian Amazon top 10! I also got the news that it will also be included in the US Amazon Prime Reading Program for three months from January, so […]
November means Nanowrimo. National Novel Writing Month. The time when I write 50000 words in 30 days. Which isn’t novel length, and the length isn’t the only thing that’s different. I really look forward to November. It’s just after my birthday, just before Christmas and it’s usually cold. So when I discovered Nano many of […]
I’ve been running a Kindle Scout campaign for three weeks now. The first two weeks were great, with plenty of time in ‘hot and trending’. But week 3… Week three was both difficult and focusing. I’d exhausted all my personal contacts and had to urgently think up new strategies. I haven’t connected my day job […]
I’ve always been confused about what category my stories fall into. I used to think they were ‘chick lit’ but, as I’ve written before, they became too dark. Then I thought that I would write ‘crime’. Sometimes it came out as ‘gritty women’s fiction’. Then, somehow, I wrote a speculative fiction novel. When I started […]
Continuing the What, Where, When? feature of writers and their writing processes, I am very pleased to welcome Tanya Reimer, author of many speculative fiction novels, to the blog to talk about her writing life. What do you write? I am a writing addict. I will try anything in any dosage. I once had an editor […]