Some news on the competition front! Remember the Book Title Generator/Flash Fiction contest? Which closed for entries last week? And which will enable one lucky entrant to end up with a lovely €/$50 Amazon voucher to spend through the computer of their choice? Well, I don’t have a winner yet. So don’t get excited. What I did get…
Month: April 2014
The Writer I Am, And The Writer I Want To Be (sort of)
This is how most people think writers write Lorna Sixsmith, writer of Would You Marry A Farmer? and blogger/chief over at Irish Farmerette, very kindly asked me to carry the baton on a blog tagging exercise where writers say a little something about how, why and what they write. As it turned out, I found it very unsatisfactory writing…
Book Covers Are Judging Me
Sometimes it feels like the publishing industry has us all boxed off into dastardly delineated categories. We are either readers of crime, science fiction, sports autobiographies, or bird-watching manuals, but never all four. Everything must be packaged according to its genre, and there are labelling rules. Chick-lit novels use loopy fonts, and have caricatures of shoes and dresses on…
Life, Books, and Everything
There was no blogging to be had last week, because there was nothing I could write about. Sometimes things happen in real life which make pretty much everything else pointless. It seems to me that writing, or indeed the making of any art, might be helpful for understanding the human condition, but only after you’ve already understood it. It’s no good at…
Flash Fiction / Book Title Generator Competition – REMINDER
A gentle reminder about this competition, which is closing on April 25th, but open for all entries now. Full details are here, but the rules couldn’t be simpler. Find your own personalised book title from any of the 3 title generators (Chick-Lit, Crime Thriller or Literary Fiction), and use that title for inspiration to write 500…
Does Writing Ruin Your Writing?
In a recent episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls, Hannah, the main character, quits a lucrative day job writing advertorials, because she’s convinced it will stifle or kill her creative writing abilities and prospects. Granted, this character is only 25 (and often mental). But many people do believe that writing in another style, kills their style. In…
Tara Sparling writes 