Kate Hudson

I can’t access it from France – what a shame!

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

Before I start writing (these days, anyway) I need to know the beginning (obviously) and some idea of the ending, but not necessarily everything that happens in between. Nothing is set in stone, though, and either may change before I’ve finished, depending on what happens along the way.

The two novels I’m prepared to own up to came about in quite…[Read more]

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.

How intersting Sea. I have a couple of short stories that are often in the back of my mind as having potential to develop into something else. And back story is often the first idea that comes to me and then I have to work out how the situation will play out in the now.

Yes, Raine, I absolutely have to know where the setting is, or I can’t w…[Read more]

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]

Congratulations Alan. Excellent news. As Raine says, do let us know how the course goes!

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.

Congratulations Jonathan, fascinating story – sounds like there’s a lot more to it than in the words on the virtual page. And congratulations to everybody who entered. I’m in awe of how you manage to come up with stories at the drop of a hat. Every month I read the prompts and think I’ll have a go but somehow I never do. Maybe this month….

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

AAARRRGGHHH! (as it used to say in my comics)

Up with the count. Resisted the temptation to count the 2500 “seed” words that I had before the start. I think I’ll have a couple of hundred more to do before I give up tonight. Remarkable difference in the way I feel about making myself write at this pace which, honestly, isn’t that high a word…[Read more]

I haven’t entered a comp for a while though lack of time but this one intrigued me and my entry is short.

I suppose it’s a form of Writer’s Block – except that I can’t stop writing. Does that make sense? Probably not. Think of it as writing your way around the surface of a Klein bottle. Yes! That’s it exactly. Thank you. I know where I am now. I…[Read more]

@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.

Well, I’m feeling a tad more apprehensive than in previous years. There’s a certain investment in succeeding this time – for me. Well, succeeding in writing the requisite number of words anyway. My record is one complete children’s story, one block of 50K words that I eventually deleted, two failures.

I think we all did that with our first book Raine! And some of us, with our second…

I know what you mean, Hilary. And FWIW I try now not to worry too much about the minutiae of all the different (with a lot of similarities) theories of story structure. That way lies madness for me. I read them and enjoy them and sometimes I get a light bulb moment and often some part of them sticks in my mind and comes to the fore when I’m trying…[Read more]