Tag: women writers
5 Mistakes I Made Writing My First Novel
I began writing my first novel thinking I’d get it done in a year. It ended up taking me four. Sure part of this was due to my full time job, and propensity to procrastinate, but if I had known then what I know now I probably could have made it happen. Here are the […]
How Disaster Movies Creep Into My Writing
Hands up – I am a disaster movie geek, which is perhaps strange considering I only write romantic comedies. Part of the attraction is the element of danger, which doesn’t exist in my day-to-day life (not complaining!) My nine to five is spent at home, tapping away at the keyboard. I don’t even risk being […]
Writing With Young Kids at Home: How I Did It
I often get asked how I managed to write a novel when I had young kids at home. It’s an almost universal dilemma: who doesn’t have a creative dream? Most of us have creativity inside us, just dying to come out and express who we really are. And yet we’re busy people – we have […]
Why We Should Reconsider The Way We Review Books
If you are an author, the uncanny ability of book reviews and ratings to fill your day with sunshine or suck you into a storm cloud may resonate with you. I’ve basked in the glow of thumbs-up reviews and ratings, and endured the gloom of a few poor ones, those fretful 1’s or 2’s on […]
On Co-Writing
For better or for worse, co-writing is a sort of marriage and therefore should not be entered into lightly. A quick Google search will tell you that there really isn’t a lot out there regarding how-to tips. My co-author, Melissa Storm, and I had to learn a lot by trial and error. From this experience, […]
On Life Writing
I’ve been thinking about life writing – what it is and what it means – since I got invited to do a workshop with offenders in Durham prison. English PEN are an incredible international organisation that campaign to defend writers and readers around the world whose right to freedom of expression is at risk. They […]
Q&A with Literary Agent Juliet Pickering of the Blake Friedmann Agency
Juliet Pickering worked for Waterstones as a bookseller and fiction buyer before joining A P Watt in 2003, working up from combing the slush pile, franking mail and scanning royalty statements, to becoming an agent in 2007. She moved to Blake Friedmann in London in 2013, and her authors have been shortlisted for Costa, Commonwealth […]
Why I Went on the World’s Longest Book Tour
We live in a world of content overload, constant contact, and ironically, an increasing sense of disconnection. As more and more human interactions are conducted online, we lose the opportunity for the simple “hello” and “how are you” that used to add something intangible to our days. At the same time, deeper, more substantive engagement […]
Books Of My Childhood
Like it is for so many others, each book that I’ve read has found its way into the fabric of my being, has helped form whom I’ve become ~ mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, teacher, writer – and who I’ve yet to become. Being the youngest of six didn’t allow for much alone time in […]
Whose Point of View is it Anyway?
When I started writing my debut novel, The Other Mrs Walker (Mantle, 2016) I kept getting transported back to 1944. Not literally, of course (though that would have helped with research) but through the eyes of one of my characters.Then another. Then another after that. Sometimes this would happen within the same page. Sometimes within […]
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