archive for "Advice"
Red Prose Day 3rd, March 2013
I’ve been trying to decide how I could contribute to this year’s Red Nose Day – and I’ve come up with an idea I’m really excited about; it’s a plan which will benefit Comic Relief and help out an unpublished writer into the bargain. Here’s the deal: on Red Nose Day (Friday, March 15th), writers can bid in a Twitter auction for an editorial report on their unpublished novel. I’ll read your first 10,000 words and send you written feedback which will cover the novel’s strengths, [...]
Gorn my son! (What the Olympics taught me about writing) 8th, August 2012
I’m not quite sure at which point I bought into the Olympics wholeheartedly, but it was probably somewhere around the time I turned to my husband during the opening ceremony and said: ‘Blimey! That’s the best Queen impersonator I’ve ever seen…Oh My God!’ Or maybe it was when the house rose up to reveal Tim Berners-Lee waiting inside, or maybe it was when Doreen Lawrence entered the stadium bearing the Olympic flag. Whenever it happened, by the end of that glorious and inspired evening, I was sold. Since then, I [...]
good enough 30th, January 2012
Liz Fenwick has written very generously here about Jubilee, about pushing herself as a writer, and about the necessity of pressing your skills beyond the point of ‘good’, to reach ‘superb’. She’s no slouch at that, as it happens, landing a two-book deal with Orion (The Cornish House is out in May). At the end of her post, she says: ‘I still don’t think it’s good enough. But that’s a good thing. It keeps me trying harder.’ It is essential to keep upping the bar. [...]