Although it sometimes feels like it, I don’t actually spend 24 hours a day glued to my chair, gazing helplessly into my computer monitor in the hope that the random keys one of my cats steps on will become the story I desperately want to write. Between commuting to my teaching job and getting out to exercise, I spend quite a few hours a week with my iPod headphones glued into my ears instead. But these days, I rarely listen to music – I top up my inspiration levels instead …

I’ve been trying to come up with a decent title for the novel I’m revising ever since it came back from the Writing Show makeover contest labelled “Untitled”. I felt sad for my poor manuscript and resolved to come up with a better title. Not having much experience with titling novels, after I’d decided on something that seemed to sound OK to me (sorry, it’s a secret), I wondered if someone in the magical world of the internet had come up with a site where you could test out your …

Unpacking some boxes last week, I found a magazine I bought when I was thirteen years old. It was the June 1989 edition of an American magazine called The Writer, and I read it in bed the other night – chuckling my way through most of it.
I was shocked by how much the writing life has changed in less than twenty years. In most ways, I’m glad it has, because the advent of the internet, and blogs (I wonder what we would have guessed a “blog” was back in ‘89) …

It was no flippant thought that had me subtitling this blog with the phrase “a whole lot of procrastination”. Heck, I’d probably have published three or four novels (fingers crossed, talent-permitting) if I was good at working hard. But just like last year when I threw myself into the chaos of NaNoWriMo at the last minute, I decided this week to give myself another stupidly ambitious target that I just might be able to meet.
For as long as I can remember, it’s been my dream to enter a novel in …