Firstly, apologies. It’s been quite some time since my last blog post, so it was high time I gave you an update. Also, I have some good news to report. SAFE HANDS . . . AGAIN As listeners to my show, The Joined-Up Writing Podcast will know, I’ve been on my latest submissions journey for…
As writers and creatives, the problem is rarely ‘I have no ideas’. It’s usually quite the opposite and we get inundated with the damn things. So how do we know which one is ‘THE IDEA’, the one that has the legs, the depth and the originality to be worthy of our valuable time? It’s a…
Short stories can help improve your writing and freshen things up when you’re bogged down in a novel. In my last post I talked about the need to ‘reset’ and ‘rewrite your attitude’ when things get tough during a longer project, and taking a break to write something short can be a great way to…
Today I’m talking about my recent struggle with self-doubt and what you should do when Writing gets you down. It’s been a while since we spoke, hasn’t it? Here we are sprinting toward the end of September and a quick check tells me that my last post was in December (an evergreen post that you…
It’s a big day for me today, in the life of what will be my debut novel – Safe Hands. The time for hiding behind procrastination and self-doubt has come and gone. I’m committing to a release date! The Novel I’ve talked quite a bit about the book but here’s the blurb for those of…
Weekly posts on Novel Writing with updates on the progress of my debut crime novel, Safe Hands, about an ageing safe cracker forced out of retirement for the sake of his dying wife and a son that hates his guts. This week I’m talking about Research – how much to do and when to do…
Another of my weekly updates on the progress of my debut crime novel, Safe Hands, about an ageing safe cracker forced out of retirement for the sake of his dying wife and a son that hates his guts. Last week was all about getting my productivity back on track but the theme for this week…
This is one of my weekly updates on the progress of my debut crime novel, Safe Hands, about an ageing safe cracker forced out of retirement for the sake of his dying wife and a son that hates his guts. In last week’s post I laid out the reasons for my poor writing performance (lack…
Last week I talked about the work I’ve begun on redrafting the beginning of my novel, ‘Safe Hands’ – focusing specifically on my opening chapter and prologue. This week, the ‘plan’ was to complete the structural work on the novel – by discarding the current end section and working out how and where to add…
This is the latest of my weekly updates on the redrafting of what will be my debut novel, ‘Safe Hands’. You can find the story so far in this previous post. This week was all about revising my opening chapter. Like many of you reading this, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether…