Interview with… Amie McCracken

Today, I've invited Amie McCracken to my blog. Author, editor and designer, Amie's the publishing director and Vine Leaves Press and helping to whip my latest novel, Small Forgotten Moments, into shape! Amie edits and typesets novels for self-published authors and helps writers polish their work. She is an imaginist, with a lot of ideas …

Wasting time with Google

I've got half an hour before I have to go out for my first haircut of the year - well, first haircut since the beginning of December - so here I am, wasting time. Although I don't actually have anything to say... I had to Google how long it would take to dig a six-foot …

Small Forgotten Moments has a cover…

You might have spotted this fantastic new offering from Jessica Bell in your inbox or on your Facebook feed, but here it is again, just in case you don't follow me anywhere else! Is Zenna a muse, a sleep-deprived apparition, or something much more sinister? Suffering long-term amnesia, artist Jo Mckye is ready to start …

Absorbed into different worlds

It's common for readers to be pulled into the world of the book we're reading, to have characters so well-drawn we feel we know them and miss them when the story concludes. But did you realise authors feel exactly the same way? We live with these characters, in these worlds we've created, far longer than …

Interview with… Meg Johnson

I'm being quiet on my blog for several reasons this month, one of them being that it's the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge when loads of bloggers commit to blogging throughout April prompted by the letters of the alphabet. Have you heard of it? Are you taking part? I've done it a couple …

The middle of April already!

Well, I told you I was busy! Two and a half weeks since my last blog post! My major achievement this week has been still having an Easter egg and a half left over (if I was writing this an hour ago, it would half been an Easter egg and three-quarters 😉) The edits I …

Drowning in words!

I've simultaneously got too many and yet not enough words! And what words I do have seem to be spectacularly in the wrong order... After spending a couple of weeks hiding from my critique partners' comments, I opened the file of my novel-in-progress and started to work my way through my notes, their notes, and …

Interview with… Martha Engber

It's the third Monday of the month, we're zooming towards spring, and Martha Engber is here to share her writing life with you. Martha's second novel, Winter Light, was published in October 2020 by Vine Leaves Press. She’s also the author of The Wind Thief, a novel, and Growing Great Characters From the Ground Up. …

Past, present, future

The house is quiet. Half of us are back to school today (teaching and being taught); the other half (including me) are still waiting for our jobs to re-open. Our local secondary school is having a phased return so all the kids can be tested before restarting their lessons, so the streets are still quiet. …

Spreadsheets, statistics, and sums

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash It's not the headline you expect for an author, right? It should be more words, plots, and sentence construction shouldn't it? Yet the more I write, the more maths I seem to have to do! Because, marketing! Getting my books in front of the readers who need to read …