Category Archives: The Writing Process

In my last blog, I wrote about doing Nano Wrimo and writing a novel in thirty days. I started that thirty day challenge knowing that I was writing a novel called No Such Cold Thing, which is important because, like my earlier novel Have You Got That Book? this was another novel that started withContinue reading “No Such Cold Thing”

  Writing has always been not just a part of my life but a part of me; ideas come spontaneously, and the desire to sit down and write is not just compulsive but intensely enjoyable. It comes so naturally that I have adopted it as my motto – the only thing I cannot imagine isContinue reading “Nothing could ever stop me writing, right?”

I’ve come back to this subject because I know this is something that authors get asked about a lot; when my bookshop hosted an author event and some member of the audience asked “where do you get your ideas from?” I would inwardly groan and wish they would ask something more original. But actually, IContinue reading “Where do Ideas Come From – Part Two”

A novel starts with an idea. Of course, it takes more than just an idea to create a novel – time, commitment, passion, all these things will be needed before an idea becomes a novel. But none of these things will make a novel if there is no idea to get them going. Ideas are theContinue reading “Where do ideas come from?”

It’s all very well knowing that you want to be an author, but it’s not exactly a job you can apply for. Going through school, college and university, I knew that I was going to have to find a job to keep me going until a publisher discovered my work and offered me a publishingContinue reading “The Bookshop Years”

I know I said that Arris would probably stay my own private Fantasy novel, but I thought I would share a little with the world and give Arris a moment in the sun. This extract is taken from a draft that has not been worked on for over ten years and is reproduced exactly how it wasContinue reading “Arris – an extract”

In the summer of 1988, on holiday in Cornwall, I bought my first dragon. It was a tiny model of a baby dragon emerging from its shell. I was still obsessed with dragons, and even though my second novel had featured dragons, I wanted to write about them even more. And so I began aContinue reading “Here Be Dragons”

I can’t recall when I finished that first novel, but I do know exactly when I started the next one, because that manuscript is clearly marked with a date – 22nd January, 1988. This was just a few days after my 15th birthday, in the fourth year of secondary school, well into my GCSEs. ItContinue reading “The Second Novel”