Stalling for Time with Tea

I've been working on a few longer stories lately, and have noticed that in every single story, at least one character makes a cup of tea. It made me laugh once I noticed how often it happened. Sometimes multiple characters per story. Multiple cups of tea. Multiple iterations of the same mundane conversation: Would you …

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Giving Characters Purpose

One thing I've noticed while I've been editing some longer short stories recently is a distinct lack of purpose for the main character. This has cropped up in two stories of mine and is something that had previously been highlighted as feedback in another story. At the time, I was confused by this feedback. I …

How Knitting Helps Me Write

I find sometimes that the best way to write is to not write. That sounds a bit counterproductive, but essentially I like ideas to 'marinate' in my head until they're ready. Sometimes this doesn't take very long, but other times it can take at least a few months. In order to speed this process up, sometimes …

Recently Published Flash Fiction

This month I had two flash fiction pieces published online, which is very exciting. It's always good to see your stories out in the wild as it were. The two stories I had published were Turnagain Lane in Issue 5 of The Ginger Collect and Bunny Girl in Spelk. Both of these stories evolved from prompts from my …

Writing Soundtracks

I am a big fan of listening to music when writing, but sometimes find the lyrics interfere with the words I'm trying to get down. In my writing group, we've got a new prompt, where we have to use a song as an inspiration for a piece of writing. We did this last year as …

World Building and Finding Inspiration

One thing I'm really struggling with at the moment is finding inspiration for writing. I wrote about trying to stretch myself in my last post and pushing myself out of my writing comfort zone, but at the moment I can barely write within my comfort zone! So maybe I need to ease off the pressure …

Writing Outside My Comfort Zone

February Writing Challenges In February, I want to try to challenge myself to write things a bit differently. I often fall back on certain structures and forms and I think it might be holding me back in my writing. Sometimes when restraints are placed on writing, it can be more freeing (as contrary as that …