I’m currently in the early stages of actually writing my novel Hell has its Demons at the moment. Because of the complexity of writing within a historical background I have been taking a carefully planned approach to writing and employing the techniques of the snowflake method, where you build up the plot structure of the [...]

I am happy to announce that I am progressing at a reasonably steady pace on Hell has its Demons. I have finished my character dossiers and I am now on the pleasant task of writing chapter summaries. Each of these includes notes on what happens in the chapter, what the main conflicts are, how the [...]

One of the hardest things in writing can just be getting started. Whether it’s starting a new piece of work or at the beginning of a writing session to get the first few words out. Another key factor sometimes is just to keep yourself going. I’ve got to a bit of a mid-narrative doldrums in [...]

My short story seems to be going fairly well at the moment. I’m working on it by going through iterations of more and more detailed outlines. Basically I started with a general outline of what the story was about, then went away to think about the characters and setting – giving things names and brief [...]

A bit of a rant about Genre As a participant in some online critiquing networks I come across a fair amount of unpublished stories written by authors, like myself, who want to get publish. These networks tend to be genre orientated – so for fantasy and science fiction for instance. I hope I’m not slagging [...]