Tag: A Word With You Press

Miracles of Kindness

There’s a lot of information on the internet for writers. You can learn all about techniques and templates, how to craft your work, sales, marketing and how social media is your new best friend. (I think that’s the freezer actually, but only because I recently freelanced a piece on the subject.)There’s some – though notably …

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All For One – Anthologies

One of the more obvious challenges a writer faces is how to fill a book. Ask any novelist and they will likely tell you that the second half of a novel is easier to write because the characters and plot are already well established, and part two is often largely about resolving the consequences of …

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July 4th

Every item tells a story. That’s right folks, it’s an on-the-hoofer…Well, of course I wasn’t going to let US Independence Day pass without a blog post. After all, as someone once said, parodying a comment allegedly made about Billy Connolly and the shipyards, I spent one year living there and 25 years talking about it. (To …

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Evolution of an idea

Back-copies still available for sale! Give me a writer who knows exactly where they’re going and I’ll give you – and them – a round of applause. Any writer I’ve ever met, be they published or yet-to-be-published, may have an inkling, or even an ambition, but that’s about it. In a sense, that’s part of …

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Mondays with Monika – 1

As you may recall, a trainee clinical psychologist, exploring the therapeutic benefits of creative writing, interviewed me. The experience got me thinking about some themes I return to in my fiction, such as loss, separation and sacrifice, and the ways in which fiction comes to be as authentic as non-fiction. But what about non-fiction that …

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Grace Kelly

Occasionally, caught in the slipstream of social media, our own voices can be drowned out by the baying of a crowd that yells, “Like me, follow me, review me, add me, and friend me.” And ‘friend’, last time I checked, isn’t even a verb. How close a relationship can it be when someone wants me …

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Writer as entrepreneur

Apparently, the term entrepreneur was apparently first used by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. Where once this was synonymous with a contractor, who acted as the third part of the holy business with capital and labour, now it means much, much more. The entrepreneur controls – either directly or indirectly – the means of production, …

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The Ones That Got Away (and one that didn’t)

Hello and ahoy to everyone. I’m just back from a relaxing and contemplative week on the Isles of Scilly. But more about that in a separate post, teaser that I am. It appears I’ve been more circumspect than I intended recently, regarding my progress in securing representation for one of my novels. I had an …

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How low can you go?

Wordcount, that is. The 100 word One Tight Write competition, run by A Word with You Press, is going great guns. It’s remarkable how much you can fit into such a small space, like the literary equivalent of the joke about fitting four elephants in a Mini. There’s still time to enter – the competition, …

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Pro Temp

Every freelance writer is in effect a working temp – and sometimes just a temp. And when work is slow, the only thing to do is follow Dolly Parton’s mantra and work 9 to 5 for someone else, using whatever skills you picked up before the writing zephyr swept you out of the conventional jobs …

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