Tag archives for Creative writing - Page 5
Author Interview – K Lynn
This week's interview is with K Lynn, an author of LGBT character based fiction, her upcoming novel, His Womanly Ways, will be released by Torquere Press on May 27th. Her novella, Coffee Date, will be released by Less Than Three Press on July 1st and is available for pre-order. How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? I've been writing since I was a child. I was an avid reader and I was always making up my own stories to go along with those I read. Plus, there was always “play pretend” when my friends or cousins got together. Making up stories was always a part of my life. Do you write for a living, or do you also do other work? I wish I could say that writing income could support me, but that's not in…
Author Interview – Samantha Bryant
This week's interview is with Samantha Bryant. Her new novel, Going Through the Change, is available on pre-order and will be released on 23rd April. It's a superhero novel with a twist. How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? I’ve always written, starting with little stories and poems as a child. It probably grew from a general love of words and stories. I just get this feeling, I describe as “itchy fingers” and I have to create something out of words. I get darn grumpy when I want to write and can’t. I’ve been taking it seriously for about two years now. When I was getting ready to turn 42, I had a little talk with myself and we agreed that it was time to try this in earnest or just let it go. That’s when…
Interview Questions
Since I put up my review policy on the blog I've been getting regular contacts suggesting that I review things, but there have also been suggestions that I might do some author interviews or guest posts. Generally I think this is a good idea, so I thought I would come up with some standard questions. Here's what I came up with. Interview questions How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? Do you write for a living, or do you also do other work? How did you get into being a professional writer, and how much effort did it take to be able to write full time? Were you always good at telling stories, or has it come to you as an adult? Were you good at English in school? What do you read for…
World Book Day 2015
Tomorrow is World Book Day 2015 and in response to a query as part of the World Book Day campaign, I’ve been asked by MVC to tell my personal story of how literature and books changed my life, and what inspired you to start blogging about literature. Early Reading Like most people I've been reading since I was about four years old. I can't be sure when I fell in love with reading, I was very young. Two books stick out though, because they lived in my primary school bag and were re-read until they literally fell apart. The Facts Factory by Gyles Brandreth was a compilation of esoteric statistics and stuff that appealed to the small boy that was me aged about 8. The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier was the other. It told the story of a Polish boy and his…
Could You Write Five Million Words?
Five million words. That's about a hundred NaNoWriMo winners worth of words. More than most authors will publish in a lifetime. Yet it's not far off what you need to write to become a good writer. Ten Thousand Hours There's a theory, most famously expounded by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, that you need to spend about ten thousand hours practicing a skill before you get to the world class level. He cites The Beatles and Bill Gates amongst others as examples of this. There's more to success than just putting in the hours, but it certainly counts for a big chunk of it. So what counts as practice as a writer? You'd think this was obvious, writing stuff, and maybe a bit of reading. However I'd disagree with that, or rather modify it a bit. What I think makes you increase…