Tag: learn to write

• August 3, 2018

  On Reading ‘A Strong Urge To Fly’ by Alan Baxter

  I read ‘A Strong Urge To Fly’ from Alan Baxter’s collection Crow Shine last night on the train home from Sydney. I’d started in late in the commute and finished just before getting to my stop. A good thing too, because I was so engrossed I would have had to sit on the platform in…
• July 27, 2018

  Writing Practice, Like Actual Practice

  I’m a lazy writer. Sometime in the last year, I don’t when, I decided I didn’t need to work at writing anymore. I had a few publications under my belt, heck, I’d won a competition. My work was good, I was good, everything was good.   And so I got complacent.   I stopped getting…
• July 10, 2018

  VLOG: Editing Short Stories

  Last week I spent a beautiful sunny Thursday editing one of my short stories. I’d gotten some great feedback from some writer friends and was ready to get stuck into the editing process. If you want to hear about how I write short stories to begin with, I have a video on that too. Happy…
• June 8, 2018

  Writing Exercise: The Buffy Effect

  I was watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer recently and it occurred to me that it would make an excellent writing exercise. Writing exercises are great to have in your back pocket for when you need an extra boost of inspiration. Exercises, whether you follow them exactly or not, get you thinking critically and…
• May 18, 2018

  Arranging Short Story Collections

  Hello Dreamers, I’ve been knocked out with the flu for the last week so forgive me if this post is a little incoherent. Last month I wrote and submitted my first short story collection and I wanted to tell you how I went about ordering my stories for submission. I’d expected it to be a…
• May 11, 2018

  How I wrote a crime story when I’m a fantasy writer

  When I won the Thuderbolt Prize for Crime Writing last year a lot of people started to think of me as a crime writer. If any of you have read my other published short stories you’ll know I’m much more of a speculative fiction writer. So, how did I come to write a crime story?…
• April 16, 2018

  I’m Writing a Short Story Collection!

  Hey Dreamers, I’ve been working on a short story collection lately and I really wanted to share with you a little of my process so far. It has been a major goal for me this year to gather all my short stories together into a cohesive collection for publication. I spent the first few months…
• March 28, 2018

  Making Money From Writing

  

  The age old question. Can anyone really make any money from writing? Whether it’s freelance or fiction plenty of people will tell you the answer is a resounding NO. Once when I was volunteering at a literary even I got chatting with a published author who was sitting on the panel. When I told her…
• January 23, 2018

  How to Use Writing Prompts to Keep Writing

  I always associated writing prompts with getting started. Used to spark new ideas or stories. What I didn’t realise was that prompts can be used at any stage of the writing process (and at any skill level). Natasha Lester’s post on how she uses writing prompts really helped with this realisation. So, while some prompts…
• November 21, 2017

  NaNoWriMo 2017: Day 20

  Yesterday I finally had time to write and, as you know from my last post, I had an idea ready to run with as well. So, that’s what I did. I wrote the whole thing (2000 words) in pretty much one sitting. God it felt good. I’m pretty sure you all know that feeling you…