Sometimes I get some intimation of what people think about writers – and it’s not quite what one may expect. Here’s a question from a poster on a Message Board about sff: is everyone a potentual writer? Is it jus … Continue reading →

Aargh. Came back from a weekend away to find my laptop has no power – I suspect something drastic happened to the insides, as just before everything went black, it went very, very hot… I am now an anomaly. A … Continue reading →

I had an email from someone I didn’t know the other day, saying he was up to chater (sic) 8 in his novel and, if I wanted to help him with any aspects of it, to plase (sic) let him … Continue reading →

First person writing has a long and illustrious history – from older classics like Dickens’s Great Expectations or R.L.Stevenson’s Treasure Island, to more modern classics such as Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Kerouac’s On the Road, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, to modern … Continue reading →

The Sunday regular blog: grammar and such… There is nothing that so marks a piece of writing as unprofessional as a feral apostrophe. And yet writing “it’s” when you mean “its” is an easy typo, and one that you can’t … Continue reading →