My Review (5 stars out of 5) It’s Christmas in New York, and Dr Kay Scarpetta and her cop pal Captain Marino are dishing out blankets to those in need when they’re thrown into a murder investigation. The body of a woman is found by a fountain in Central Park, bearing all the hallmarks of…
Category: Writing
‘Three Sisters’ by O J Mullen
My Review (4 stars out of 5) Businessman Lewis Stone has a few issues with his business partner, but the firm’s Christmas party isn’t the place to thrash them out. Desperate to escape and try to enjoy the festive break, he jumps into his car and sets off for home. Having turned down the offer…
‘Masquerade: The Lives of Noel Coward’ by Oliver Soden
My Review (5 stars out of 5) (Audiobook) As a playwright, Noel Coward is best known for his most popular stage plays ‘Private Lives’, ‘Hay Fever’ and ‘Blithe Spirit’, though he wrote many works that are largely unfamiliar to the theatre-going public. He also wrote novels, screenplays and serious and comic songs, such as ‘Mad…
Writing Routines and Other Challenges
One of the things a lot of writers will press upon would-be authors, is the necessity of writing every day. As I often remind myself, Stephen King says, If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. However, for those of us…
Book Titles vs Synopses
As a reader, I’ve never liked knowing what’s going to happen in a book before it happens. Those troubled individuals who have to read the last page before reading the rest make my head spin. With writing, it’s exactly the same. Way back in the summer of 2013, when I began to write novels seriously,…
Book Reviews and the Coming of Wisdom
Having always been an avid reader, it wasn’t until I started publishing my own books that I realised the importance of having them reviewed on sites like Amazon and Smashwords. When I started writing reviews of the books I read, the early ones were either books I’d wanted to read for a while, or those…
Writing the Self
Writers are often asked how much of themselves and their own experiences end up in their writing. For my part, I’d say I’ve found it almost impossible to avoid including my own feelings, experiences, and opinions in what I write. However, while I’ve often used something real as the starting point for a scene or…
Dialogue Tags and Other Irritations
I’m sure most writers work hard at their craft, constantly finding ways to improve their writing, to make their work better, more appealing, and more fun to read. From my very first novel – a children’s adventure titled The Devil’s Porridge Gang – I did my best to make the novel like one I would…
What’s All This First Draft Nonsense?
Whenever I read blogs or Twitter posts by an author who’s just finished the first draft of their WIP (work in progress), I always wonder if I’m the only person in the world who thinks first drafts are just another way of saying, ‘what I’ve written is crap so I’m going to do it all…
The Upstanding Writer
I’ve written elsewhere about my habit of standing up to write, but it’s always useful to reconsider ways of working to see if they’re still effective. For the last ten years my day job has been in occupational therapy, a role which involves a bit of driving and a bit of desk work. Long-standing back…
Colin Garrow 