After two weeks and industrial amounts of red ink, I have finished a first paper edit of my book. There is still a lot of work to do, but the gaps are slowly being filled in, or at least identified. The next step is to get back on the keyboard to take in the many,… Read More Book report: red and read
This is what 94,000 words of a manuscript look like. It’s surprisingly heavy: I have cheated a bit because this thing is rife with notes in the copy like THIS MAKES NO SENSE! and EXPOSITION!! Plus there’s at least one chapter that still needs to be written from scratch once I get a better overview… Read More Book report: words and more words
Progress! I have had such a writing block recently, but a WhatsApp chat with some writer friends over the weekend has given me a fresh perspective. They were discussing the use of index cards to organise/rearrange the chapters of a WIP. One person said that if they can’t sum up what happens in a chapter… Read More Book report: psychics and nannies and Post-its
I hope you’re all well, regular readers, and occasional ones too. From my writing friends, I gather that everyone is experiencing the same difficulty with concentration. I suppose we all just have to trust that it will return in time. My MS is currently moving at a snail’s pace, though it is moving. I’ve completed… Read More Book report, week who knows: heaven and earth and Youtube
Three blog posts. That was the extent of my writing week, three blog posts. Two were author interviews with excellent writers – Laura Besley about her debut flash fiction collection The Almost Mothers, and Nicola Cassidy about her third historical novel Adele, based on the life of Fred Astaire’s fascinating sister. I also entertained myself… Read More Book report, week 11: Porgy and Bess and Strout
Most of the author interviews I do are with writers celebrating the release of their first books. Today I’m delighted to welcome back Nicola Cassidy, who I interviewed back in 2017 about her historical debut December Girl. This month sees the publication of her third novel, Adele. It recounts the real-life story of Adele Astaire,… Read More Adele Q&A
My stats have bottomed out. That’s ok, you’re all busy queuing for toilet rolls at a safe distance or disinfecting the letterbox for the postman. I’m just trying to stick to my accountability experiment, which is, unsurprisingly, not going well. Writing is impossible at the moment when the world is so insane. How do we… Read More Book report, week 10: heart and hobbies
It’s been a poor writing week – there’s probably no need to explain why. I started with great intentions, using an idea by Cork writer Catherine Ryan Howard. To write her first drafts, she sets herself a daily goal of 1,250 words. She prints out a table with the goals and rewards herself by crossing… Read More Book report, week 9: charts and uncharted territory
I’m back to a slow canter through my MS, though finding it hard to concentrate with all that’s going on in the world at the moment. I keep rereading the same section, trying to pick up the thread again, and it feels so terribly plodding. But I don’t know if this part of the book… Read More Book report, week 8: hope and Hope
It’s been another disastrous writing week, unfortunately. I’m hoping that I will be able to return to full concentration soon, but it just isn’t possible at the moment. Whenever an idea pops into my head, I take notes, and my noticeboard is full of Post-Its for future use. Film research-wise, I watched Annie Get Your… Read More Book report, week 7: absence and Annie
