De-blog

Nige - my other half – is a singer/songwriter. He'd likely tell you otherwise, but I heard his songs (and learnt all the lyrics – it's an affliction) before I even set eyes on him, so whatever else he claims he is, he is also a singer/songwriter. I mention this to qualify something he said to me not long after we became friends: there are only so many ways to combine the musical elements; inevitably, people will write melodies that have been written before. Or something like that. I'm paraphrasing to fit the theme of this blog post, which will be short. I'm trying to get back into the habit of posting more often than once a year. That point about songs came back to me a couple of weeks ago when I was watching artists on YouTube demonstrate how to draw faces, and one of them said something about all art being derivative, stolen from others. The key is to learn to 'steal like an artist'. So I don't sidetrack, I'll just add a link to a TED talk by Austin K...

Every now and then, I remember I'm supposed to let my readers old and new know what I've been up to, what's on the horizon and all that jazz. Well, this is going to be a short (but hopefully informative) post. :D (OK, not that  short. I don't really do short.) We're midway through 2019 - the first year in many (since 2013) when I haven't already written at least one novel, and I'm OK with that. I realised a couple of years back that I'd somehow ended up on the book factory line, which isn't a bad thing, as it comes from readers actively asking for more. For instance, I wrote Checking Him Out in 2014, and enough people wanted Noah and Matty's story, so I published  Taking Him On in 2015 (and Checking In because people wanted more of Sol and Adam too), and then there was Jesse and Leigh's story, The Making of Us , which I released in 2017. During those three years, I also co-wrote the Seeds of Tyrone series with Raine O'T...

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of the differences between British and American English. Most of us know, for instance, that crisps are to Brits what potato chips are to Americans, and so on. We're also aware of the differences in spelling - colour vs color, realise vs realize etc. - although in UK English both -ise and -ize are acceptable, and there are exceptions in both forms of English. If it's lists you're after, here's a Bored Panda list of common differences in vocabulary. See also this more extensive list on Owlcation . There's also Luke Mastin's  very comprehensive list of US/UK/Canadian spellings . I decided to put together this brief guide for the benefit of my fellow editors, proofreaders, authors and others who work with the written word on both sides of the Atlantic, as questions about what is 'correct' come my way quite often, and I like to think I know a fair bit about this stuff. OK, I do  know a fair bit about this ...

This probably isn't going to be the kind of post you're expecting, and, in fact, it has relatively little to do with M/M Romance per se. Had I reached a particular point in my writing life ten years earlier, this blog post may well have been titled 'My love-hate relationship with YA Fantasy'. I can write in both genres incidentally, although perhaps not as well as other authors. I am (or I was) most comfortable writing contemporary realist fiction, so even when I'm attempting to write within other genres, the outcome is somewhat of a crossover. Contemporary fiction is broad and not that descriptive as genre titles go. Indeed, it is not really a genre at all—it doesn't even have an entry in Wikipedia! :o It is, in effect, a catchall for any fictional story set in our time and space, and which doesn't fit neatly in any other genre. Anyway, that's what I write. Wrote? I don't know. I'm still hopeful for a present participle... that...

Well, I planned to hit a milestone before the end of 2017, and I thought I’d missed it (damn you, Deb, and your rubbish record-keeping), but in the process of writing this blog post, I discovered I didn’t miss it at all. Hurrah! What am I talking about? This… 3,003,924 …is how many words I’ve clocked up since I started writing ‘for real’. Which is rather good, as I was aiming to hit three million, and I did. However…my annual word count has dwindled over the past four years: 2001: 105,342 2003: 8,600 2005: 1,062 2007: 111,813 2008: 122,414 2009: 66,735 2010: 52,771 2011: 101,820 2012: 183,373 2013: 515,840 2014: 486,425 2015: 474,692 2016: 399,912 2017: 373,125 😞 New Year, New Me? Hahahahaha. No. If  I was the kind of person to make New Year resolutions (which I’m not—you can set a goal  any time you like.  Pretty radical, huh?), I’d be setting one to hit 400k words in 2018. Last Words of Last Year… Anyway, here were the last w...

We - A.M. Leibowitz, Emily Alter and me (Debbie McGowan) - got together and interviewed each other today. Here's the result! ~ QUESTION 1 ~ Amy Okay, so how's the weather? Emily Cold. I’m freezing and I don’t like it. Amy Cold and gloomy here. Debbie It's a typical mid-autumn day - sunny, not quite warm enough to go out without a cardy. Amy Sun would be nice! It's supposed to warm up a few degrees later...and then rain. Blah. ~ QUESTION 2 ~ Debbie OK. So, can I ask 'where in the world are you?' Amy Gah! Now I have the Carmen Sandiego theme song stuck in my head. I'm in western NY. I usually say I'm near Buffalo because people have heard of that city but not mine. I'm really in Rochester. Debbie gone to look up Carmen Sandiego theme That's so great! Emily Spain, a city (cough cough town) in the north (you know, the part of Spain which is always completely ignored). Debbie The top comment on the Carmen Sa...

I'm going to start with the key points. Don't work your ass off. It's not worth it. Should you decide to take my advice, be prepared for resistance - the better you are at working your ass off, the more resistance you will meet. Also, be prepared to discover that working your ass off is no more productive than sitting on your ass and watching other people work. Mostly. I don't mean that, but I really hate the phrase 'work smarter not harder'. It makes me want to kick chairs over. To elucidate: I haven't had a holiday (or vacation, if you prefer) since...2000? I think that was when it was. Not what most people would call a holiday, at least, which would seem to consist of: a) leaving home and all of the accompanying responsibilities for a set period of time; b) not doing any work for the duration of that time. What d'ya reckon? Does that sound about right? Whatever, no doubt people will tell me I've been given opportunities for holida...

Recently, I saw an online conversation that began with an author asking the question 'Why do you write?' As expected, there was a whole variety of responses , but one in particular caught my attention. It came from an author who claimed they wrote to make money, and if they weren't making money, they'd stop writing. I believe them, and I have nothing against people writing for that reason. However, in the comments that followed, there was a strong insinuation that any author who claimed they did not write for money was lying. I do not write for money. Not that I'm saying I wouldn't like to make some money along the way, but it doesn't even feature in the list of my motivations as a writer. My first novel - Champagne - I wrote because I could. I had no dreams of publishing deals, nor of being a best seller, nor of seeing my name up in lights. I wrote it because the ideas were in my head, and I wanted to explore them. My second novel - Hiding Behind T...

I read an interesting post about sensitivity readers over the weekend, and by interesting, I mean more than a bit offensive and - accidentally, I'm quite certain - an excellent demonstration of why sensitivity readers are important if an author/editor/publisher wants to avoid a public trouncing. (I'll come back to why I have phrased it this way.) For those reading this post who don't know already, a sensitivity reader is someone a publisher/author asks to read a manuscript to check for potentially offensive/problematic content. This includes the deployment of discriminatory/offensive language, events that may act as psychological triggers and anything else that may be considered a 'sensitive subject' for some readers. Sensitivity readers have specific expertise, either through professional affiliation and experience (e.g. a nurse in palliative care fact-checking a book dealing with the treatment of terminal illness) or because they are part of the political mi...

I've been tagged by the gloriously talented author Jonathan Hill to write a blog post on writer's pet peeves. If you haven't read any of Jonathan's stories, go and do it right now! My blog post will still be here when you're done. OK, so, pet peeves, hmmm... I'm not sure I have any. Ha. Who am I kidding? (No-one, I imagine). I have loads, although they're either so ginormous they're less 'pet' and more 'keep in a safari park in an enclosure marked PLEASE KEEP YOUR VEHICLE WINDOWS SHUT AND LOCK ALL THE DOORS!', or they're so tiny and fleeting they're gone and forgotten before I can get too peeved. I love writing. There is not one story I've written that I don't at least like, and of the 'works in progress' on my computer, there are only a couple I'm not fond of...right now. It's more a case of how daunting the task is of turning them into stories I'd be happy to put out there for others to read. ...