Last month’s blog, which was written at the start of the summer heatwave and was about books set in hot places, seemed to strike a chord with a few people. As the heatwave intensifies, maybe it’s time to think about cold places as setting. The novel...
it’s still June and already records have been broken. I feel quite fortunate to live in Edinburgh and not Spain. But I’m fascinated by extremes of temperature. In fact I’ve got the first draft of a MG book which is set entirely in the summer of 1976,...
We’re off to the Canary Islands for a week, and as my bags sit waiting in the hall, full of suncream and fiction, I find myself thinking about travel writing books. We have a small shelf of guidebooks which we never look at these days because of course we look...
An interesting article in the Guardian recently made me think about that advice you hear all the time – to be a successful writer, you should write every day. I’ve never found that works for me. I’ve done Nanowrimo a few times; this is where you try to write a...
To celebrate the launch of my new super dooper look website, I thought I would re-visit my first ever blog, which was basically me musing about Edinburgh being chockablock with writers. I was sitting in Inverness at the time, working pretty much full time as a...
I am not going to claim to be any expert on social media, but thought I would just share with you some of my ideas about managing social media without it affecting your writing time. Firstly I hardly ever post something spontaneous. All my tweets and posts for my...
