Getting started as a writer
Or what I know now that I wish I knew then (and what I’m still learning) as a writer. 1. Believe Many new writers don’t believe in themselves when they get an idea that they want to be a writer. You have to doggedly hang on to that tiny spark of belief that you will […]
Releasing some words into the world
Why do I fear stepping into the limelight and releasing my writing, my words, my voice into the world? I’ve delayed the launch of my novel ‘The Alien Eve’ from October last year and every step of the way I’m fighting with myself to just do it. Filled my time with studies, doing Nanowrimo for […]
The writer’s source
We are our writer’s source; the well spring from the conscious and unconscious elements of our minds. Our lives, our biology has fed into who we are, still feeds into us, every second of every day we are alive while we are awake and in our sleep from within, dreams remembered or not. The minutiae […]
Writing and the human mind
‘…each of us who dares to reach in and pull out what is truly ourselves brings a new way of seeing into the world.’ Hal Zina Bennett, Write From The Heart. Our minds are incredible. The power to learn and the power to imagine and create. From birth, connection after connection is made in our […]
Writers’ doubt and how to live with it
Doubt is normal. All writers have it, get it, live with it. Published, unpublished, still thinking about doing it and/or starting it one day. But when it strikes, and I’m not talking about the little itty bitty strikes of ‘oh, perhaps if I change this one word, oh, yes that’s it, it’s perfect’, I’m talking […]
Writing a third novel and still doubting
Imagine that you’re writing your third novel and still doubt that you can be a writer. Last September I completed a novel. Not just a first draft, or a second structural draft, or a third draft tightening everything up, but the final, read it all aloud, every single word, draft and I have three chapters […]
Nom de plume versus my real name
One of my tutors said that ‘writing is like taking your knickers off in public’. And it’s exactly that. I think it’s scary, really scary trying to be a writer and even scarier showing others your work. When I started this blog, I had a decision to make and figured that my own name was […]
Time to write, Time to blog
I haven’t written a blog post in many months. I did however complete one novel and begin another. So the question I’m asking is if authors of years gone by didn’t spend their time on social media, why was that such a bad thing? I already know the answer to my own question. The market […]
The positives of procrastination
The byline of this blog is simple ‘Writing and the art of procrastination’ and yet I’m loath to admit that I get more productive after I’ve procrastinated a bit. After all, we’re supposed to be productive all the time, you know, bang out the 5000 plus words of our target before lunch. Every day. Simples. […]
Tackling writer’s block
We can spend days, weeks, months, or years blocked as we get through our novels. Some of it could be due to not knowing. Not knowing how to write, not knowing how to craft a novel, not knowing what happens next… In a previous post I wrote about being stuck, the responses that came out […]