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Category: Literature
Writers have different schedules, but they all create that best seller…
Writers have their own schedule, their own way of completing the wordcount and getting to THE END of a novel. Here are my thoughts...
Why Were So Many Women Accused of Being Witches?
Here's a blog post about why so many women were accused of being witches.
Holding out for a hero….
Are the male protagonists in romance novels too good to be true? Or is it possible to take them into our hearts?
Appreciating ‘Dappl’d Things’ during lockdown
During the difficult lockdown moments when the sun isn’t shining and the world looks quite bleak, when people no longer have a reliable source of income and they can’t buy some foods or they have to queue at a distance to get them; when we all miss the simple things like going out for a …
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Twelve protagonists? Why not?
Recently an author-friend of mine said a novel she’d written had been refused by a publisher because there were four central protagonists, which they said was three too many. There is a template in romantic comedy that requires one heroine, someone with a problem that needs to be solved, one handsome male who might do …
The joys of research for a writer- and the scrapes…
As writers, we are often told that we should write about what we know. That much is true – we write about people, places, relationships and the vagaries of the human condition. So much of what we write is based on what we know already. But sometimes our writing ventures into places and areas we …
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In praise of audiobooks
Today is world book day and I'd like to bring up the topic of audiobooks. Life is a learning journey and it is good to have the opportunity to reconsider and sometimes even change our views. I’ve always loved reading - I'm usually stuck to the pages of a book, often multi-tasking, reading while I …
What I learned about writing a novel from the TV detective series Luther
As a writer, I try to learn about the craft of writing a novel from every source I can. The obvious source is reading and I try to read all the time. Each day I’m perched on my exercise bike for an hour, devouring anything I can get my hands on, and even if I …
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Pausing to think about The Stopping Places
I read Damian Le Bas' book The Stopping Places in two days. It's the sort of book that should be available everywhere, on all shop bookshelves, in libraries, schools and universities, and widely read. It offers a first-hand account about the Romani people, the culture and their experiences in society, in history and in the …
That quintessence of dust 