Storms can take many forms; there are the storms outside which loosen your house tiles, play havoc with your flower pots, fling your recycling bins down the street, flood parts of your home and drench everything in sight. There are the storms in your day to day life which disrupt relationships, friendships, careers and life […]
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I’m in the NaNoWriMo trenches and it’s been a tough weekend. At one point things got so challenging I started procrastinating about how the life of a writer feels very similar to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Here are the similarities with Lord of the Rings and being a writer: Your story is the ring […]
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I am the owner of a small gang of unruly cats and an over excited dog. As an enthusiastic pet owner I often project human traits onto my animals. I am always talking to my cats and dog. They all have elaborate fictional histories and we often speak to one of my cats about his […]
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It’s not easy being a writer. We find ourselves drawn to tweed based outfits, berets, Twitter, book shops and attractive notebooks. We stare into space a lot, walk around with pencils permanently tucked behind our ears, get excited over word counts, cover our walls in post it notes and lose ourselves while reading books. One […]
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It has taken me a long time to accept this. When you start out as a writer, your ego assures you that ALL your stories will, at some point, turn into bestselling novels. You happily fill up an array of notebooks with stories, quietly confident, they will all feature somewhere in your future writing career. […]
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Inside the minds of most writers the same questions must rotate on a regular basis. These include: – Am I a good writer? – Am I good enough to write a book? – Do I have what it takes to write a decent book? – Do I have what it takes to sell books? – […]
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Following on from my tweet yesterday about asking for someone to start a notebook therapy group I have decided to do a notebook based post which I hope some of you might relate to. Here are 10 things NOT to say to someone with a notebook obsession. These things will irritate us. We know we […]
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Last year I wrote a post on how writing about characters who reinvent themselves can spark a change in your own life. Back then writing about Pippa’s transformation in my book, Instructions For Falling In Love Again, had sparked enormous change in my own life. My post questioned whether writing about change had this magic ability to […]
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This post is for writers like me that write a lot and shelve a lot. Some writers I know rarely give up on a story and stay with it until the bitter end. Sadly I am not one of these writers. Underneath my writing desk I have boxes of notebooks filled with half finished, shelved […]
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This post for anyone out there who has always secretly dreamed of writing a book and has spent a lifetime putting it off. You can try to ignore it all you want. Feed yourself silly excuses like you have never written a book before. Deny you want to write a book. Tell yourself it is […]
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