As I was writing Captive, we were all learning about a virus called SARS COV 2. It is now a ghastly and ever-present fact of our everyday lives but it has been largely ignored by the world of fiction. I don’t watch a lot of TV but I have yet Read more…
Spoiler alert. If you have not read Cabal, move away from this page. A couple of readers have asked me about my writing process and asked about my use of mind maps. As an example here is the mind map for Cabal. I doesn’t fully align with the story because Read more…
Quite a few of my readers have asked me about my writing process, so I thought I would take a moment away from writing Three to talk about it. People who know more than me say that writers fall into two camps: (1) the planners who work out all the details Read more…
What do Isaac Asimov, William Blake, J.K. Rowling, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut and Emily Dickinson have in common with me and probably many of you too? Depression. I really value my friends on Twitter and FaceBook but my latest bout with the black hand Read more…
Ok. So you’ve got to draft 3 (or 4 or 5) and you’re happy with the plot, the characters, the relationships. There’s tension on every page. Your editor, if you have one—and you should!—has helped you get this manuscript into top shape. You have given a last careful read-through of Read more…
As a writer, I sometimes get stuck creatively. I have heard this referred to as writer’s block but it is not exclusive to writers. Whether you are a business person, an engineer, in medicine, the arts, government or an NGO, you are likely familiar with the frustration of being creatively Read more…
I don’t usually use my blog to discuss politics but I feel I just need to speak out on this one issue. Whether you are Republican or Democrat, Conservative of Liberal, whether you live in the USA, Canada, the EU, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia or New Zealand, our politicians Read more…
I am lucky to have had excellent critical acclaim for Junkie both on Amazon and on various blogs. So imagine my horror when I looked at the reviews on Goodreads. Among the 5-star and 4-star reviews was a 2-star review and worse, the opening sentence ran, I was very tempted to give Read more…
When I was twenty years old and living in Sweden, I ran across of copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. As it did for many others, it changed my view of the world. As an ambitious young man from a working class family, I felt that it offered me a Read more…
I first dipped my toe into the waters of writing eight years ago. It has been an amazing learning experience and never more so than in the last six months when I embarked upon this wild indie-publishing ride. I have been an avid reader for all of my life (that Read more…