Author Archive: Alison Morton
From Long To Short: A Short Story Phobic’s Tale
Being honest, I found short stories difficult. Distilling a tale down to 1,000 or 2,000 words without making a good, meaty story seemed a terrifying task; no character development, no sub-plots, little if any world-building, no wide cast of characters, no complexity, I thought. As a newbie writer several years ago, I tried very hard […]
Taming The Novella
I write long-form fiction, around 100,000 words, and I’ve published six of these full-length novels in the form of two trilogies. In my hand, the books are chunky and pleasingly real. I’m in my stride, in the zone where I can be as complex as I like. Each of my characters goes on a journey […]
A Tale of Two Trilogies
One evening in 2009 a writing trigger was pulled in my mind; I sat in front of my computer and poured out a story of high adventure set in the present in an alternative new Rome, but with a twist. It included a hunky hero, but the story was driven by a young woman who transformed from a prickly […]
Is There Any Hope For Qualifiers?
Very, quite, really, pretty, a bit, just, fairly, rather, amazingly, almost, nearly, obviously, clearly… such naughty words! Or are they? Placed directly in front of adjectives or adverbs they are a shorthand method of qualifying the meaning of that adverb or adjective. Sometimes they flounce around by themselves only accompanied now and again by a […]
A lesson learned
A lesson learned Picture me at a writers’ conference, a good two years before I published INCEPTIO, the first of the Roma Nova thrillers, in 2013. Full of enthusiasm, going to every class, talk, workshop and seminar followed by long nights in the bar discussing structure, characters, pitfalls, agents, heroes, failures and successes, I was […]
Planning the End or Ending the Plan?
Incredible what a tweet can do. On 18 April Barbara Bos of this esteemed site posted a quotation from Rose Tremain, “In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” I raised the query whether this was clever, or just poor […]
Can a Self-Published Author Have an Agent?
Can a self-published/independent author have an agent? Surely, it’s a contradictory state? Well, no, not in today’s publishing world. Last May, I signed with A for Authors literary agency to represent me for subsidiary and foreign rights. As the congratulations flowed in, I was a little overwhelmed by the lovely things people said on Facebook […]
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