Tag: Writing

• “A glorious outpouring…(draft 1 and 2)”

  FIRST DRAFT was completed in one long glorious outpouring over the Summer. I felt like a WRITER and would spend hours thinking about the plot and characters happily inhabiting my imagination for hours on end, pencil in-hand. Plus, I didn’t have to do any major re-editing. Yes there were crossings-out and paragraphs to refashion but…
• “I’m not sure about telling you this”

  Now I’ve had some serious doubts about doing this post. Don’t ask me why but sharing video of the marshes by the Thames Estuary didn’t seem too bad in comparison but here goes. I’ve told myself I can always take this post down if I wake up in the middle of the night in a…
• “Location, Location, Location”

  The Thames estuary was always an important place to me when I was growing up. I lived close by when my family moved to a council house in Conrad Road in Stanford-le-Hope, Essex. The road was named after Joseph Conrad who lived there for a short time. The River Thames and shore were used as…
• “How long did it take to write your book?”

    If you’re anything like me you’ll be wondering how long the whole enterprise of writing a novel and getting it published might take. Aside from the pretentious but not entirely untrue answer that it took me my whole life, the novel actually started three months after my mother died back in 2010. Some 12…
• “What is it that you want from writing a novel?”

    At one point I had to ask myself that question: “What is it that you want from writing a novel?” It may be an easy one for some of you to answer but it certainly wasn’t for me. I had written for many years, even as a child I created comics. In my adult…
• “Writing a novel: a double-marathon not a 5,000 metre race”

    In response to lots of queries I’ve had in the course of writing this novel I thought I’d use the blog to chart how I wrote the novel and the various ways I tried to get it published. Writing this book led me on a huge journey, one which I was wholly unprepared for:…