With November fast approaching, you might be considering taking part in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Challenge. But what is it like to take part? In this video (my first ‘proper’ video and my first writing video on my YouTube channel), I talk about my experience of taking part in NaNoWriMo over the last three years.… Read more
Last year, I wrote a short story for a competition by Mind, the mental health charity. The story, ‘The Journey’, was shortlisted but didn’t win any of the top prizes. Given that I wrote the story specifically for the competition, I didn’t really know what else to do with it, so as it’s currently Mental Health Awareness Week 2020, I thought I’d share it here. I’ve tweaked it only slightly and even had a go at illustrating some of … Read more
I recently submitted a story called ‘The Journey’ to an online competition. As it was Mental Health Awareness Week recently – and the competition was run by Mind, the mental health charity – I wanted to talk a bit about the story and how I came to write it.
EDIT: You can now read the story here.
I don’t normally go in for this sort of thing. It seems like a lot of celebrities have passed away recently, including many who I admired or respected. Normally, however, I just think “that’s a bit sad” and try to move on, since I feel that anything I say will somehow sound hollow or insincere, or will just be the same thing that a million other people are saying.
Thursday was different. On Thursday Sir Terry Pratchett died and I … Read more
Given my interests and line of work (i.e. the fact that I am a massive nerd), you probably won’t be surprised to know that a large number of my friends were the sort of people took great delight in pointing out (and complaining about) every little detail that was changed from the books to make the Harry Potter movies. Many of these are the same people who are now among the armies of angry monkeys kicking off after EVERY SINGLE … Read more
As part of the process of creating the world for my story, I was working on a mini-website called the Databank, which contained information about the characters and the world. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was difficult to maintain and ultimately fell by the wayside. However, I recently returned to the idea and explored a different solution that has been incredibly helpful to me, so I thought I would share it with you.… Read more
OK, this blog entry is a bit different. I thought I would share some of my experience of attempting to write a series of novels and short stories. I will probably write a few entries on this subject every-so-often with updates on my progress, but for now I’d like to share some of my experiences, resources I’ve found useful and some of the key things I’ve learnt along the way.… Read more