Back home after a lovely few days away (and yes, we played the Haribo story game on the way back too, my favourite being the crazy experimental chef whose fairy godmother stopped by to teach him how to boil an egg, and who sat down with her to soft-boiled egg with soldiers every night after […]
Continue readingThe recent developments in e-ink are fascinating, particularly for writers and readers: hot on the heels of the Freewrite comes the Onyx Boox, an e-ink Android laptop/tablet/typewriter (just when you thought the genres had settled down, here we go again…). There’s a video and more info here: http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/onyx-boox-typewriter-18-04-2017/. Being able to write wherever you like, […]
Continue readingHere, curated by the wonderful folk over at Brain Pickings, is a great collection of great writers’ advice on writing: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/05/03/advice-on-writing/. Many of these are aimed at novelists, those hewing out great literary works, but there’s plenty here for people just trying to put one word after another to get their message across too. The first […]
Continue readingWhat better way to start Easter Sunday morning than with a solitary run in the predawn to meet a small, chilly group of cheerful folk and stand together quietly watching the sun rise? I remember my first ever Easter sunrise service, over in Bramhall Park in 1985. It was the first (but not the last) […]
Continue readingA looooong drive up the M6 today to visit Grandma near Manchester, but I have a secret weapon. Gone are the days when World War III would break out on the back seat while I was negotiating the roadworks near Sandbach: on a trip a few years back I stumbled upon the Haribo storytelling method […]
Continue readingLove books? Love quotes from books? Love Pinterest? You’ll love Postepic. You know that feeling when you’re reading a book and a sentence or phrase leaps out at you, it’s the most perfect string of words you’ve ever seen, it’s moved you, or made you laugh, or it contains a profound truth beautifully expressed. Until […]
Continue readingSo today I met up with seven others, all graduates of the last running of the This Book Means Business Bootcamp, and we sat together in the Jane Austen room in Reading Museum and wrote for most of the day. We met at 10am, chatted and faffed around for a bit, then set our intentions […]
Continue readingIf you’re like me, you find sitting down to write your book in silence alone in a room agonising. Every time I do it I can feel the energy draining from me. There’s an urgent clamour of Stuff That Must Be Done Immediately, from answering an email to sorting out invoices to stripping the beds […]
Continue readingOne of the things I love about hosting the podcast is that I get at least five ‘touches’ on the content: 1. when I’m preparing for the interview – reading the book, researching the business and the interviewee’s background, thinking about what will be interesting for listeners, preparing the questions; 2. during the interview itself, […]
Continue readingSo this is interesting. US actor Alec Baldwin has just had his biography, Nevertheless: A Memoir, published with HarperCollins. He’s done something smart, which is to create a Facebook page for the book to host the communinty of fans and as a platform on which to host additional content and an insight into the story behind […]
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