General

This is where posts that don’t fit into any particular category are placed.

Oct182021

What is The Novel Planning Journal and How Can It Help You?

If you follow me on social media, you’ll have heard about my new book, The Novel Planning Journal. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing some insights into this book as well as some information on the different sections contained within it.

The Novel Planning Journal

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Nov252020

2 Free Serials For December

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog but I’m excited to say that I have something special planned for the month of December. Christmas might be a little different for everyone this year and in the tradition of giving something back, I’ve been thinking about what I can do and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy it.

Free December Serial Reads

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Jul232020

Writing During Lockdown

It has been quite some time since I’ve updated my blog. At the start of the year, I’d promised myself that I would try to write a weekly or at least a monthly post, but as the month’s progressed, Covid-19 happened and everything changed. Schools were closed first followed by a complete lockdown here in Ireland. To say this had an effect on my writing is an understatement. I don’t know what it was exactly, but the muse seemed to vanish for a little while and perhaps it was the fact that my mind was now occupied with home school, watching daily news updates, checking on family, and all the other things that I guess many of us found ourselves doing.

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Jan212020

New Year, New Writing Goals

It’s January and I’m already late with my writing goals for this year. The reason for this is that my focus shifted slightly during my Christmas holidays. I spent a lot of time asking myself what it is that I actually wanted to achieve. It’s a really great exercise to do if you find you’re unsure of the direction you are taking.

2020 writing goals

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Nov062019

On Not Doing NaNoWriMo

I have twenty minutes to spare so I thought I’d do a quick blog post on why I’m not doing NaNoWriMo and what is happening for me and my writing during the month of November. If you hang around the writing scene, you will no doubt have heard about NaNoWriMo and have seen a lot of authors posting their daily word counts. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and this is where writers try to complete 50,000 words in 30 days. Yes, that is a lot. It actually works out at 1,667 words every day.

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Oct252019

11 Creative Writing Editing Mistakes

Last week, I listened to a wonderful talk that discussed creative writing editing mistakes that writers make. The talk was held in the Inkslingers Den Facebook Group which is a great resource for writers. The talk was given by Angela James, a professional editor who worked for Carina Press for over 10 years. As I watched I took notes and decided to share her 11 editing mistakes here on my blog too.

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Oct162019

How to Create Character Profiles Part 3

Following on from part two of creating character profiles, here’s part 3 of how to create character profiles. As you know, I’m writing these posts as I work on creating characters for a new series I hope to start next year. In today’s post, I’m going to look at fleshing out my character using the Marcel Proust Character Questionnaire and some more questions I’ve found online. Below is the image I’ve found for my main character.Character Profiles Female

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Sep252019

Using Pictures: Character Profiles Part 2

Last week, in part 1 of this character profiles series, I mentioned that I was going to start working on character profiles for my next story. To help get me started, I paid a visit to Pixabay (not the best move as I tend to end up browsing this site for hours on end, salivating over all the fabulous images) and began my search. I typed female into the search bar because I knew I wanted my protagonist to be female. This yielded thousands of results but nothing in the first couple of pages jumped out at me. I decided to get a little more accurate so I opted to use genre instead. Most of my stories tend to have paranormal or fantasy elements so I put fantasy into the search.

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Sep172019

Character Profiles – My New Writing Experiment

I’m looking at character profiles today and starting a new writing experiment to help me determine if this is something I should be doing. The idea came about after reading some interesting character profile questions that writers should know and I kinda liked the idea of doing something like this. I’m also trying to stay focused while I decide what story to write next.

Character profiles

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Aug122019

The Book With No Name To Be Published in Cabinet of Curiosities

I’m beyond thrilled to announce that my story, The Book with No Name, has been accepted for publication in Owl Hollow Press’s upcoming Cabinet of Curiosities anthology.

Cabinet of Curiosities

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