Category: How To and Tips
Swimming Laps on the Page with Sonnets
When I started swimming last year, I could only do the sidestroke, the backstroke, and a flailing version of the breaststroke, which entailed me arching my face out of the water like a horse and frantically kicked my arms and legs. I was too spastic to do the crawl, despite years of lessons at pools, […]
What Happened When I Gave Up My Day Job
It’s now been over three years since I gave up my day job to become a full-time writer. I had a high-powered busy job and I travelled extensively for work. The launch of my first novel had to be fitted in around my work travel and felt like yet another chore that I needed to […]
How I Embraced Vulnerability to Tell the Story of Becoming Starlight
Writing a book. To be quite honest, the thought had never entered my mind; I’d never written anything other than personal prose or patient charts that were never meant to see the light of day. The idea was so remote that it would’ve been, as in the Twilight Zone monologue, like “opening a door into […]
How To Write Really Interesting Blog Posts
For many writers, a part of promoting themselves and their books is writing blog posts. But many of us (say me for example) find ourselves looking at a blank page and a blinking cursor and freeze up. We might write a 90k novel with no hesitation, but the idea of writing a 900-word blog post […]
My Writing Journey — She’s Mine
‘You just think lovely wonderful thoughts,’ Peter explained, ‘and they lift you up in the air.’ Peter Pan, J M Barrie She’s Mine, my debut novel marks a milestone on my three-year journey from aspiring writer to published author. If I had to sum up my advice to new writers from what I have learnt […]
When Is It Time To Consider Yourself A “Real Writer”?
It seems a lot of us writers have a tough time coming to grips with the idea that we are, indeed, writers. It’s a touchy subject, this whole who-is-a-writer business. It’s funny, I’ve always been very comfortable calling myself a writer, because I’ve made my living as one for more than 20 years. But there’s […]
Women Adventuring in Time
Time travel novel heroines? It’s a pretty short list. Most of these characters fall into another century and fall in love. There’s nothing wrong with that reason for parting time’s folds, but a fascinating subset of time-bending heroines have other agendas. Some aim to improve the present world by changing its past, in large and […]
The Windy Road to Writing
If you had asked me when I was a kid what—or more accurately, who—I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer would have been a cross between Marlo Thomas’ character, Ann Marie, in “That Girl” and Jane Goodall, the British primatologist. Ann Marie was a struggling actress living in New York City, an […]
How I Found my Literary Agent
Three years ago, I was a freelance writer with an extremely long Word document chilling on my hard drive. Today, those 98,000 words mark my shift from aspiring writer to fiction author: The Lost Night is coming out from Crown. My novel is a thriller about a woman uncovering the dark truths surrounding her best […]
The Paradox of Inspiration
My father was the proverbial rocket scientist. He had more than 120 patents on everything from missile guidance systems, to seals for airplane windows, to antilock braking systems. I can remember, as a little girl, waking up and being told by my mother to be quiet because my father was sleeping. He had awakened with […]
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