Julie Cordiner

Thanks Elle. These are good prompts. I’m very into settings, which I think comes from my previous life as a conservation ecologist – working in some amazing wild places. So I’ve always got to have a strong sense of the natural world that my story takes place in – weather, plants, animals, noises, tides, rock types … yeah maybe I go too far, but…[Read more]

I liked the prompts, Jonathan – their utter randomness and the idea. Stick with it. Nano will be a slow month, but we all might need a little breather mid month to keep ourselves sane!!

Sounds good. Plenty of things said and unsaid in there. Of course, now you’ve spent ages deciding on that, your editor will definitely want to change it again!!

That’s amazing @Daedalus!! SO exciting! Although not for him, obv. For him that’s the ultimate defeat *sobs offscreen*. And I love it when you realise something, and there’s that ‘well, yes, *obviously*’ feeling to it. Like that facet of your story was there all along, you just hadn’t spotted it. So good.

Well done, Daeds, a star is born!

I’m just watching it now. It’s brilliant. Well done, Daed 😁

ooh, hark at you, the hotshot expert!! 🙂 Well done, Daeds, this is fabulous. Exciting to be a part of, I imagine?

That’s interesting @elle. Is it that level of tutor contact in all the online courses?Sounds like it runs the risk of being a bit hit and miss. I did think the London based courses looked a lot more in depth and directly tutored. And they have a great reputation .. But they are A LOT of money, and yanno, in London. Sigh.

I’ve never started a piece of fiction knowing the ending. I like to start with a scene, put a character into it, and see where it goes. I enjoy the ride.

INteresting question. Funnily enough, sometimes the first thing I get is the setting. I’m very into the atmospheric setting & its role in the story, so that’s definitely there before I start any planning or research or even think about characters! The other thing though is a pretty formless idea of some sort of ‘issue’ I want to explore. Not big…[Read more]

Wow, well done, Alan. That’s a major bit of validation, and those courses look great. I’ve eyed them a few times, but never bitten, so will be really interested to hear how you get on.

Oh, well done, @alanr! That’s fantastic. So which course are you going for?

@KazG & @emmad – oooh, I like the phrase ‘thinker on paper’! That sounds a lot closer to what I do. For all my love of graphs and themes and character outlines, and more graphs, very little of the detail gets decided until I’m in the story. I think it’s a little like my old self’s data analysis process – first you gather all the plethora of…[Read more]

I’m pretty sure I’ll get the words down. But right now I have only the vaguest plan and I can’t think of even a working title.

Very interesting blog. I, too, have listened, enthralled, to Craig’s lectures on this, and have read an enormous amount of stuff about structure. I’m struggling rather with it now, at the almost-finished-the-second-draft-of-my-novel-stage. I don’t know if my struggle is because I’ve read too many different models/descriptions and have become…[Read more]

Good article, Daeds. I might try to hunt down the Twitter thread to see what else was said.

I saw someone (Hellie Ogden I think) say that 60% of her submissions either fail to meet the submission criteria (format, genre, basic spell checks etc) or are clearly at way too early a draft to be sent out. I was so guilty of this last with my first…[Read more]

Hi L,

I think you could trim most of the paragraphs in the first half of the story, really. The Physics thing (tight pants) early on could go, you use this analogy later on anyway. Watching a film at the cinema, that paragraph could be less wordy I think.
And towards the end – “zipped her hoodie and pulled the hood over her head” etc. I know…[Read more]

I think “Spotting an opening…” needs a new para. The lipstick thing is a little over complicated, I think you could shorten it without losing anything.
The “pills like skittles” analogy doesn’t work for me.
“Small-to-medium-time” seems a cop-out, he’s a small-time crook, I think.
“Anticipated to sit..” should be “anticipated sitting”.

I’d take…[Read more]