A couple of years ago I got an opportunity to take part in a fantastic project. A group of young researchers with a range of (dis)abilities, involved in a Barnardo’s project, wanted to investigate and share the experiences of similar young people. They were trained and supported by academics from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) to conduct interviews and collect stories of resilience and transformation from other children…
The UK’s heatwave has finally broken (temporarily!) and as it’s a curl up on the sofa kinda day, I thought I’d give you a new blog post and a couple of quick reads! At the same time as working on my main projects, I also like to dabble with shorter bits of writing. They’re fun, they keep me fresh and they exercise different writing skills. They’re also often linked to…
You might have noticed that I haven’t blogged for a very long time. Last year was a fight for my writing life! In fact, the last two years have been a real writing struggle, as you can see from previous posts, and I got to the point where I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. The more I learnt about the publishing industry, the more demoralised and disillusioned I…
Words are powerful. Music is powerful. When the two come together they can create magic! Music can not only elevate good lyrics to greatness though; it can also, unfortunately, elevate crap lyrics through catchy (read: irritating) melodies. You know what I mean – that song you hear in the morning that gets stuck in your head and you find yourself singing it throughout day even though you hate it! It…
I LOVE space. Exploring it would be the ultimate adventure. What we do know is awesome and beautiful, and there’s so much more that we have virtually no idea about. In fact, I find it so mind-boggling that I can never find adequate adjectives to help me communicate the feeling it gives me!! NASA’s Juno probe survived another close sweep of Jupiter recently, sending back the most incredible pictures (definitely…
On my last round of agent submissions, one agency threw me when they asked for something different to the usual author bio, pitch, back of the book type blurb, synopsis, first 10 pages or 3 chapters, etc. etc. They wanted to know “what drives you as a writer?”. Argh! Something clearly drives me as a writer, otherwise I wouldn’t still be doing it. I came up with a few ideas…
A few weeks ago I had huge fun taking part in a 48 Hour Flash Fiction competition! I didn’t make the shortlist sadly (6 stories out of the 418 entries – perhaps I came 7th?!), but I wanted to share my story with you, as well as give an insight into its creation. The challenge was to write a sci-fi flash fiction story of up to 2000 words in 48…
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote this post about where I was at then and what I hoped might happen in 2016. I’ve discovered over and over again that “every step on a writing journey takes a LOT longer than you think”. I’ve confronted and been thwarted by numerous Threshold Guardians. I’ve definitely gone into the Inmost Cave and am having a bit of an Ordeal if I’m honest. When…
Back in September a friend shared a writing competition on social media. I don’t generally write short stories – as the wonderful Berlie Doherty (one of the judges) said on the award evening, they’re a very specific skill and not one I’m interested in developing further at the moment – but it was an intriguing brief. You could choose from 5 different opening lines and the story needed to be 1,000…
You only get one chance to make a first impression, we’re told. The importance of that first impression – first sentence, first paragraph, first page, first chapter – is impressed on us writers time after time. A story must instantly hook the reader and reel them in, convincing them it’s worth sticking with this book in their hands. While that’s true for all books, it’s even truer for Children’s and…
Hi, I'm Mel (you figured that out already though, right?!) and this is where I chat about things that relate to and inspire my writing, as well as share some of it.