How was your writing week?

What did you work on last week? This weekend I went out to get air and space and write about Josef. He is complex, myriad, messy and he confuses me. From a literary perspective he frightens me. He doesn’t have a neat personality swatch. I’ve written him already. I’ve written all the scenes he is

Aiming for clean writing

A while ago I received a rejection for a short story. The rejection criticised a word I used, saying it had come to its present meaning through abuse of its true meaning. The word was ‘livid’ and I had used it in its sense of referring to whiteness. I thought this was quite unusual and

Rewriting

I had a novel idea today (no pun intended, honest). I thought I might type up the draft chapter I wrote for what I currently call The Quinta. This might not sound ground-breaking, but I’ve been stopping myself from getting any further into it until I have finished my young adult manuscript. I’ve been so

Amazing rejections

I’ve had some amazing rejections lately. You might think that would be slightly depressing – and you’d be right. It is. A little. But I’ve received three rejections from two different genres of short story market and all three have given me personalised feedback and encouragement. It feels as though – just maybe – I

The success paradigm

I have felt very irritable and stressed the last few days and I haven’t been able to discern exactly why. It’s hot, my children have been pushing their boundaries more than usual, I’ve had house-guests. There are so many variables who would know where to begin? Then yesterday it occurred to me that perhaps my