Like the last time I decided to go to Wigtown, I once again found myself booking a last minute visit. I soon discovered that most of the rooms in and around Wigtown had been booked up months in advance, but surprisingly, I managed to book a room for one night right in the centre of […]
Tag: Diary of a Young Writer
Sick of Harry Potter yet? No, me neither, but since Harry Potter exploded into our lives in 1997, there hasn’t really been a major book series since that has captured the minds of teenagers and adults alike in the same way. Sure there has been The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Twilight, Percy Jackson and The […]
It’s horrible, criticism. Everyone hates it. We hate it even when we know the person, and know that the person is actually trying to help us. Often we’re criticised by mean people we don’t know, and that really does suck, but if you’re trying to become a successful author then taking criticism and dealing with it […]
Do you know the one thing that I cannot stand? Whinging Authors. Particularly authors who whinge about the lack of book sales, or even, whinge that they have sold a paperback version of their book but, because it’s not the kindle version, they get less in royalties. I mean come on! I know it’s tough […]
If you write and publish books for a living then you probably groaned when you read the title of this blog. It can take many months (6 months minimum) between finishing your book and all of its edits, to it finally being published. Many authors begin writing their next book whilst simultaneously working on the finishing […]
I’ve been performing my poems for about three years. I started out performing at open mics in local pubs and as part of women’s poetry group Wummin’s Words, before performing at a festival on the Largs coast and in FreshAyr’s poetry events. Around this time, I found a treasure trove of spoken words events in […]
I’ve written it before and you’ve probably heard it before, the English teacher exclaiming that the colour of an inanimate object is a clever tool used by the author to convey and deepen an emotion. I mentioned this briefly in Blog 37: On The Importance of Words but I didn’t explain why the author chose blue […]
Belated Happy holidays. Holly, jolly holiday season. It was that time of year again. The Christmas adverts were out, Christmas films were back-to-back on the TV, we had Christmas snow (or, in the case of my hometown, a slippery slick of sugar-coated sheet ice), the same five Christmas songs were on a loop in all […]
You might not think that authors are often artists too, but it seems to be true that creative people like to explore lots of different creative avenues even if their efforts are purely for pleasure and never taken seriously. With the recent opening of the British Library’s ‘Harry Potter – A History Of Magic’, I […]
When I tell people that I’m an author and that I write YA fiction, I am often met with looks of wonder and awe. Most people seem to think that writing a book is an amazing feat, something that ordinary people just cannot do. It is flattering to say the least, and as much as […]