Carroll and Dexter, Hardy and Herriot

(I apologise if the formatting of this post is a little odd; I've been having handling problems with my WordPress today). As Jae mentioned in her post yesterday, reading is just as important for every writer as writing is. I'm sure you know that. This can be any sort of creative reading. I think I have, …

(TCWT) Character Therapy…But For Whom?

The Teens Can Write, Too! blog-chain prompt this month of July was *clears throat*: “Take any character from one of your books and put them in a therapy session.” For this, something I never know how to approach (I saw a similar prompt some time ago, but I passed on it at that point, not …

Character Flowers: Caroline

I turned to see a young woman. Her tight-fitting cocktail dress implanted its picture in my mind, for the way the scarlet shade hugged her curvaceous body, lounging in the doorway of another room, it burnt the image to my core. “And who are you exactly?” I asked, raising an eyebrow so she would notice …

Not a Post

After the nice fluffiness of last week’s birthday week, I’ve not been having a very fortuitous week this week. After a particularly down day today and getting my last chapter polished for my Critique Partner, I have no energy for the Wednesday post (though, that’s not to say that I don’t have ideas and half-material). …

Details I Want to Know – Making a Character Tree

Working with an alternate universe has its upsides – one can invent a whole culture and landscape without having to specify and conform to the world as it is now – but it also has its downsides. One being that, for When the Clock Broke’s sequel, I’m working in the future, and, I have calculated, …

Character #totalrunningmonologue

(I honestly meant to write this a while ago and it has lingered in my Word document for too long. Again.) I suspect I am not alone when I say that I find internal monologue a tricky thing. I, having had issues with voice (ironically, the teenage voice escapes me unless I exaggerate the British …

Another Next Big Thing

Basically tagged by Joan, I decided I do another Next Big Thing, a companion to my previous, but this time, about my other main novel. What is the working title of your book? A TALE OF JACKETS AND PHONES From where did the idea for the book come? Interesting story, actually: my school put on …

To Sequel or Not?

Sequels are infectious things. I say that as an observer of life as well as a writer/reader. One only has to look at the charts of books and films to see a trend: where book one is popular, its sequels are present, too. Hunger Games. Harry Potter. Twilight. I can see the commercial point of …

High Stakes?

We all face stakes in our real lives – being a writer is probably a stake in itself! But what can set fiction apart from life is the types of stakes that feature in novels. I’ll use Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant series as my example(s) of the fantastic. It’s fair to say that these novels …

Agnetha King: Behind the Character

I thought I'd do something fun, since I'm not really in the mood for a great written post today, and as I've been (on-off) rewriting Of Jackets and Phones, I thought I'd blather on about my precious MC.   For instance, to expand: Golden Hair. If I could, I'd lighten the hair altogether (note to self, …