Christmas Anthology

I have a gift for those who read this blog: a Christmas anthology containing a fantasy story written by me. I have just fixed the epub and pdf file links, as they did not appear to be working. epub file  mobi file pdf file   It has a diverse range of stories written by writers from […]

My writing efforts in November

The graph to the left shows a drop in my word output in November, suggesting I spent much less time writing. That is not the case. My word output dropped because I was proofreading/editing and redrafting. I continued redrafting a novel and spent a week trying to finalise a long short story due for submission […]

My writing efforts in October.

I finished the first draft of Branded in mid-October. At 135,000 words, it is way too big for a young adult novel, so I will have to try to cut tens of thousands of words from it. I have already written notes for its sequel, set 20 years later. I am happy with the story, but […]

My writing efforts in September

Once more, it has been a while since my last post. I have been extremely busy writing and doing other writing activities, as you will see in my update for October.  But this post is about September. In September, my Ulcerative Colitis decided to remind me of its existence, so I had to take some medicine, […]

My writing efforts for August.

I have finally made time to write my monthly blog post about my fiction writing efforts for the previous month. I have been extremely busy writing, editing, critiquing and being sick. Yep, my ulcerative colitis has come back at the wrong time, but when is a good time for it? Fiction Writing. I continued writing […]

My Writing Efforts in July.

graph of words done this year

I am starting to feel a bit more like a writer who is actually doing more than dreaming about becoming a novelist. July has been my best writing month this year, as shown in the graph. I wrote 17,127 words of my novel in the month, an average of 552 words per day. And I […]

My writing efforts in June.

I wrote more words of my novel in June than May, even though I started using Facebook again. I had a rule of not logging on to Facebook until I had written at least 500 words. So, on some days, I did not even log on to it. However, I developed the habit of stopping […]

A Review of Steve Amsterdam’s What the Family Needed

Cover of What the Family Needed

I enjoyed Steve Amsterdam’s award-winning apocalyptic, climate change novel Things We Didn’t See Coming, so I quickly purchased a copy of his follow-up novel What the Family Needed. Calling Things We Didn’t See Coming a novel might be a misnomer as it is a collection of short novellas. But they all feature the same character and […]

My Writing Efforts in May

old typewriter

In May I started behaving more like a writer, even though I am still very tired. I wrote a lot more, and I started critiquing again. I put this down to quitting Facebook six weeks ago. I really missed Facebook, to begin with, but not so much anymore. I gave myself permission a few days […]

Review of Brother in the Land

Brother in The Land begins with teenager Danny taking a break from working in his father’s corner store for a long bike ride into the English countryside. It starts to rain, so he takes shelter in a World War II pillbox. As he waits for the rain to stop, he sees the flashes of nuclear missiles […]