It is early morning after a day of fiddling around with my author facebook page, which I have just changed to ‘shop’ format so that I can link my books to The Store at Scholastic, updating the look of my website and adding some out & about notes from the last couple of months, putting together a newsletter of sorts, and generally getting a sore back from spending too much time on my behind. Note to self: get up and move more today. Outside, it is just getting light, clouds ar

Did I say last time that I wasn’t keeping up with my blogging schedule? Did I say that I had started trying to set some priorities? Hah! Who was I trying to fool? Mostly myself, I guess. ...in my dreams... Have you ever heard the saying about what is urgent is seldom important? I somehow managed to reach the stage where I had some important things that had become urgent as well. This resulted in my recent school holidays being turned into a race to finalise a course I (or two

Everyone who has been to primary school probably knows that a story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and some will even remember that there has to be a problem and a resolution in there somewhere. Maybe there will also be a vague idea about a 'story mountain', and, depending on how artistic your teachers were, there will also be a memory of a prettily drawn mountain, something like this: ... the idea being that when the story starts everything is fairly normal an

I promised last time that I hadn’t said all I was planning to say on the subject of planning, and I also promised that I would let you know how the workshop I was going to went. It went... brilliantly. And completely changed my ideas. Since spending a day with the amazing Kate Forsyth, Building Castles in the Air at the ACT Writers Centre (gosh, I wish they would find their missing apostrophe!), I have developed a whole new lease on life in planning. I now understand my own s

Planning is one of those vexed questions that some experts on writing can become quite passionate about, even resorting to saying unkind things about writers who do it differently to them. I’ve read quite a lot about planning, however, and I’ve come to the conclusion that EVERYONE plans (or, possibly, doesn’t plan – but I’ll come to that in a moment) differently. At the two extremes are writers who plan their story to the nth degree with everything that is going to happen nea

Believe it or not, getting words on the page can be daunting for anyone, even seasoned writers and best sellers. Having a firm idea for your story is only the start. Sitting down every day and knowing what you want to write is both a habit and a skill, and some days it will seem easier than others. The first thing to realise is that you have to commit to forming a writing habit. There are different ways to approach this. Word Count Some writers have a word count that they str

Happy New Year! only a couple of days late... ...I’ve been looking around the web for the last week or so and finding a lot of posts about new year’s resolutions, setting goals, making plans, changing my life in 5 simple steps, and just plain taking time to look back over the last year to see what worked for me, and doing it again. A couple of things occurred to me. One was, why for the New Year? Every day is a new day, and every day is a great day to take stock and think ab