World building is a big thing for writers today. Readers and viewers like to escape to the familiar, fantasy or unknown worlds where our characters dwell. As we embark on designing our new world, we’re thinking landscape and orientation, key features and markers. An important part of cartography for writers is referring to what’s already […]
New Normal
What is the New Normal? I cut my hair with kitchen scissors today. Some of you mutter, “That’s not normal.” Which was deliberate on my part, because now I can ask you, “What is normal?” The old one has gone and none of us has any idea what’s coming in its place. None of us […]
Writer’s Learning Curve
2019: Context, Focus, and Distraction I’ve travelled my latest learning curve in what has been a strange year for me and for most Brits, I think. I won’t be sorry to see the back of it, although things can always get worse. What writer was ever an optimist? Politics worldwide have become increasingly dystopian. The […]
Peak Performance
I can’t believe it. We’re almost halfway through 2019. Feels like I haven’t done much these past few months, but I try to measure writing progress in more than output. Thinking time is also writing time, although a working writer needs it on the page. Deadlines help, but if you’re writing on spec you have […]
Format Matters
I Hear You, I See You To begin a discussion about why format matters in screenwriting, I’m going to start with an amazing story. In 1977, NASA launched two exploration vehicles into space, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were programmed to explore around Jupiter and the outer reaches of our solar system. Voyager 2 […]
My 2018
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory If any writer’s roller-coaster emotional journey could be plotted on a graph, it would probably look like a sin wave, or like the knee-jerk stock-exchange pic I’ve attached to this post. Writer, do you ever feel like one of those air-filled man-balloons dancing crazily outside gas stations? Yeah, probably all […]
Flat Squirrel Book
It’s out! FLAT SQUIRREL My new book for middle graders, and for grown-ups who never grew up. I had a lot of fun writing it, although there were the tough bits of nailing the story logic and making the prose readable. You’ll find it in the Troubador Bookshop and on Amazon dot com and dot […]
Focus or Die
Focus or die is a line from my new book, FLAT SQUIRREL, to be published on 28 June this year. It’s in the screenplay too, which I wrote just for fun, since animation studios like to write their own scripts and I’m not inside the magic circle. Yet. Blogging Indifference I don’t blog as much […]
How To Survive the NaNoWriMo Quicksand
NaNoWriMo is the acronym for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a 30-day write-fest in which you write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. It happens every November. Breaking this down, you have to nail 1667 words a day, on average, for each day of the month. Weeks one and two are mostly great. […]
The Small Stuff
Full of Angst Don’t sweat it, unless you’re a writer, then the small stuff becomes the devil in the detail. I’ll explain later, first I want to talk about stress. Writers are plagued by doubt and angst. Find me one who isn’t. Writers’ insecurity is magnified by our inability to pinpoint exactly what we’re anxious […]