Blog - Getting published
post archives- March 2016
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Diversity and New Stories – subsidised Creative Writing Workshops for BAME writers
‘There are stories out there we aren’t hearing.’ (Kamila Shamsie) There’s been much talk recently about diversity in publishing (viz: the lack of it), and many creative initiatives to rebalance the scales, from blogger Naomi Frisby’s #ReadDiverse2016 to essay collection The Good Immigrant (ed. Nikesh Shukla), crowdfunded in three days thanks to enormous popular support (read more)
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timey-wimey: a letter to my (former) self
Dear Shelley-from-the-past, Put down that Crème Egg and listen to me: this is important. I’m writing to you from 2015, via an ingenious time-travel mechanism, the specifics of which I can’t be bothered to concoct. I won’t tell you anything about 2015 because if I did it would irrevocably alter the history / future of human (read more)
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False beards and wicked women: what writers really need #3
What do writers really need? A mentor, that’s what. They need a seasoned professional to offer the voice of experience, whether it’s in matters technical (‘that structure may not carry the story; have you thought about this one?’) or personal (‘Yes, you can do it. Yes, you can. Here’s a bit of cake. Now go (read more)
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What writers really need #2
Since my blog post on what it is that writers really need, I’ve been thinking about the things which reliably support my own work. I thought I might blog about them from time to time in the hope that, if you’re a writer too, they might support yours. I’m starting with the idea of a (read more)
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Monkeys with tea: what writers really need
There’s been a lot of debate in the past couple of weeks about the usefulness of creative writing MAs, after author and MA tutor Hanif Kureishi’s claim that they are a waste of time (asked whether he’d have enrolled on one, he bracingly replied: ‘that would be madness’). The Grauniad on Saturday ran a three-page (read more)
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Red Prose Day
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– and I’ve come up with an idea I’m really excited about; it’s a plan which will benefit Comic Relief and help out an unpublished writer into the bargain.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 (read more)
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Gorn my son! (What the Olympics taught me about writing)
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 (read more)
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The Other Half of Me
As I write this, we are in the throes of a truly British summer which means, of course, that the sky is the colour of anthracite and high winds have forced the British sailing teams to take a break from their pre-Olympic racing. It’s the perfect moment to curl up with a book which will (read more)
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cover story
When I told people that Jubilee was going to be published, the first thing they asked was: ‘Do you have a cover design?’ or – in a variation on the theme – ‘Do you get to design the cover?’ I’ll deal with the latter question first. No, I do not design my own covers. If (read more)
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Life! Death! Prizes!
Steve May is a very good bloke and a cracking writer. I first met him on a ‘second drafts’ course at the Lumb Bank Arvon centre, where he and his wife Caron were centre directors. All of us on that course were deep into our manuscripts, all ambitious for publication. On the first night we (read more)
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good enough
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 (read more)
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In which I show you pictures of my launch party
What a cracking night it was! And the best thing about it was all the lovely, lovely people who came to celebrate with me. I wanted the party to be packed with friends, family, and those who have helped Jubilee on its way over the *mutters a large figure* years it took to write and (read more)
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Really Good Salted Caramels
I’ve been spending some time on the comfy sofa at Jen Campbell’s blog discussing Jubilee, photography, and really good salted caramels. Jen’s a kind of literary multi-tasker; she’s a prolific blogger on all things bookish as well as a poet who, in a recent feat of endurance, wrote 100 poems in a single weekend, raising thousands (read more)
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Happy and Baffled
How does it feel to have your debut novel published? Bizarrely, after all the emotions I have had to capture in words – yearning, love, fear and joy– this is one of the harder things I’ve had to express. I wrote something about it for this blog yesterday. It was terribly erudite, referencing Peter Pan and (read more)
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