I woke up this morning quite late – around 10 – feeling a bit overwhelmed at everything I needed to do today – which ranged from housework and house improvements to working on the book and book admin to social/family commitments … The kitchen was… Read More
OK. So for my rewrite, I have to (among other things): work more on building chemistry between hero and heroine, make Mr Wrong more attractive and have more of a rationale for the heroine falling for him, kill off a few superfluous characters and build… Read More
It’s been a pretty good writing week. Yesterday, to raise the stakes in a scene, I decided to get a character in trouble with the police, which was fun. And today, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea that would introduce… Read More
I think every writer has probably had the experience of suddenly seeing something so blindingly, embarrassingly obvious that you can’t believe you didn’t notice it, oh, 90,000 words ago. I certainly have. Why is this? Maybe it’s because it’s often so easy to tinker around… Read More
Looking out at the bleak miserable weather today, I was thinking it was a nice sort of day for curling up with a big bar of Galaxy, a huge mug of tea and a blockbuster. With the obvious exception of Jilly Cooper (her earlier ones… Read More
You know how you start doing one thing … but first you have to do something else… which means you end up doing something else again and you don’t finish any one thing and it all becomes a mess, like when you click open too… Read More
Hello again. Has everyone given up on their New Year’s Resolutions yet? Or are you thin, non-smoking and fluent in Mandarin? I haven’t exactly given up on mine. I prefer to spend the first two weeks of January whittling my massive list down to the… Read More
Goodbye, 2011 and hello 2012! I know that 2011 has been a fairly terrible year worldwide but from a purely personal point of view – it was great. In January I gave up drinking for the month (with only partial success) and went on a… Read More
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that in romantic comedies (films and books) the heroine only ever has one friend. Normally this friend is also her flatmate or colleague, or occasionally sister. In Friends with Benefits, poor Mila Kunis’s ‘friend’ is her mother. (And then… Read More
Julie Cohen, whose blog I’ve mentioned before, had an interesting post the other day about the importance of understanding your book’s theme. Not as in ‘it’s about a woman who runs a sweet shop and meets a bank robber’ but the deeper theme – maybe… Read More
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