The River Ness in Inverness As mentioned in my New Year post, I've been focussing on the completion of my two unfinished novels, and I'm happy to say I've actually got to the end of both of them, more or less. Because 'The Elusive Widow' is longer and therefore will probably be harder to edit, …
Hope Triumphs over Experience, as often happens
I'm happy to announce that yesterday I created a new writing plan for 2022, despite having failed in all previous attempts to keep to one. I think there's slightly more hope with this one as I added a new element, which was that as well as turning over the page and starting again, something I'm …
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Changes of Mind
This afternoon I published the latest of my Pitkirtly Mysteries to Amazon and Smashwords. As I write this, it should already be visible on the Smashwords site, which happens almost instantly, but the time it takes to appear on other sites always varies depending on the review process of the various online bookshops. It's entitled …
Another year, another NaNoWriMo
I've taken part in the November NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) every year since 2006. The first time I did it, I was on a mission to prove to myself that I could finish a novel in a month. It was a kind of signal that I would start to take my writing seriously at …
How can it be autumn already?
I am happy to report that I've just got past 20,000 words in Pitkirtly XXIII ('The Christmas Catastrophe') and the story is progressing more or less according to the very vague plan in my head. This is in spite of a recent blip when I realised I had written a pivotal chapter in a way …
Summer Update
This seems like a good time for an update on my writing projects, as, after quite a lot of months of writing about 1,000 words every morning, I am about to have a short break to go away for the weekend on a train (actually 8 separate trains in all since my journey from Scotland …
Towards the Endgame
At lunchtime today I reached the 50,000 word mark in 'Pitkirtly XXII' (still no title but don't panic - I've always managed to work something out before publishing, up to now anyway). This is significant because by this stage in a novel I almost always have a good idea of how it's going to end, …
It’s Almost Time!
I hope everyone reading this will be pleased to know that I've at last got to the point in what I like to think of as my writing schedule where I can start writing Pitkirtly XXII. I plan to begin a new document for this tomorrow, with the rest of today being spent re-reading two …
Writing in Lockdown
I noticed there was an article in The Guardian the other day about the difficulties of writing during the pandemic - here's the link in case anyone is interested (it focusses mostly on writers failing to find anything to be inspired by during lockdown, but there is a mention of a problem I had about …
Crossing Genres
I was complaining the other day on Twitter about not having anything to write after finishing the two things I had been working on, and someone suggested writing a silly short story in a new genre, so here it is in all its silliness (disclaimer - there is no award-winning children's book and I don't …