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Story Ideas: This Way

13 January 2012

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As any writer who does events in schools will tell you, one of the most common questions we get asked is “Where do your ideas come from?”. There are as many answers to that question as there are writers in the world, but I thought I’d share the story of where my most recent idea [...]

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Evolution of The Beast

4 January 2012

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Tomorrow (5th of January) is the official publication day for the penultimate Invisible Fiends book The Beast. I’ve decided against doing blog tours of any of that stuff for this book and will instead be posting a lot of content here on the blog that you’ll hopefully find interesting. I’m going to start by talking [...]

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Set your writing goals now!

1 January 2012

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In a recent survey on Twitter a lot of my followers said they’d like me to post more writing advice here on the blog. The following blog post, then, is aimed primarily at those readers who are interested in becoming authors themselves, but a lot of it can be applied to anyone so don’t go [...]

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Getting published – my story

2 June 2011

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Last week, I was asked on Twitter how I first got published. I promised I’d write a post about it the very next day and I did, but… um… a big dog ate it and ran away. So, for @LaraNoJutsu and anyone else who might be interested, here (more or less) is how I got [...]

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Collected writing tips

13 March 2010

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Since starting this blog back in February 2008 I’ve tried to at least occasionally write something that readers might find vaguely useful. I haven’t often succeeded, but I’ve tried, at least. Surely that counts for something? Anyway, now that I’m doing more and more author events, I find myself being asked to share writing advice [...]

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Manuscript Critiques and Evening Classes

9 June 2009

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Although my knowledge of anything that might prove useful in the real world is sorely limited (how to fix cars, how to administer first aid, how to cook anything that isn’t toast, etc, etc), one thing I do know a bit about is writing.  That’s why I’m allowed to do books an’ that. As such, [...]

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Sometimes this writing lark’s hard

3 June 2009

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It’s been a while since I’ve written anything constructive about the process of writing, so we’re probably overdue for a writing tip or two.  But tough luck, I’m not giving you one.  Instead, I want to talk about what I’m working on at the minute, and why I’ve barely managed to write 1000 words over [...]

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12 Tips for Pro Writing – Part 3

27 April 2009

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In the last two blog posts we’ve looked at tips 1-8, so logically let us now conclude with tips 9-12.  Then I can get back to writing any old guff about wasps or whatever on here, instead of trying to seem all clever an’ that. 9.  Experience beats research The internet is great.  In fact, [...]

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12 Tips for Pro Writing – Part 2

17 April 2009

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In the last post, we looked at four tips that could help you on your way to writing professionally.  I should have mentioned at the beginning that when I saw “writing professionally” I mean becoming a published writer of fiction.  A lot of the tips will apply to other forms of writing – articles, non-fiction, [...]

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12 Tips for Pro Writing – Part 1

13 April 2009

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During a recent school visit, I was asked what you need to do to become a writer. Because we were about to run out of time, the only advice I was able to give was “practice”. But of course there’s more to becoming a professional writer than just writing a lot. I may not have [...]

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