At the Frome Festival Writers' Question Time (click on Programmes > Frome Festival > Frome Festival 2011 Live Recordings) one question which came up was about keeping going: how do you deal with getting stuck? We all chipped in with our experience, from Debby Holt's Plotting Walk, to Matt Graham's printout of his mortgage payments, stuck above the monitor. At one point I mentioned the notorious Thirty Thousand Doldrums: how for some reason, at least to judge by straw polls among my writer friends, round about the 25-30,000 words seems to be the sticking point for many writers.

The odd thing is that the 30k doldrums seem to happen at that point whatever the natural length of your novels. Debi Alper gets stuck there, nearly half-way through her 75,000 word thrillers; I get stuck there when I'm only about a fifth of the way through a 140,000 word novel about history.

And then quite separately, when we were talking about planning, Rosemary Dun metioned something she's learnt from long-established creative writing teacher Roselle Angwin.

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Just a quick post - because I'm not here, I'm still in Devon - to say that the two events I took part in at the Frome Festival were recorded by Frome's very own Internet readio station, Frome FM, and can be listened to on the full version of this blog. Click on Programmes, and they both appear in the list of New Stuff. Scroll down the list of programmes a little, then click on the one you want. I will blog at some point about the experience of judging a competition, but meanwhile these are straight from the authors' mouths...

Frome Festival Writers Question Time brought together scriptwriter Matt Graham, performance oet Rosemary Dun, novelist Debbie Holt and me together. Children's writer Steve Voake was that gift of a chairman, making the most of some excellent questions to get the best and most interesting stuff out of all of us.

There was some really interesting stuff about an excellent group of stories, in the session announcing the winners of the two Frome Festival Short Story competitions.

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This article in the Bookseller (the industry magazine for booksellers (duh :)) ) is depressing reading, but there's a good deal of truth in it:

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/childrens-publishing-haemorrhaging-talent.html

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One of the questions in the Strictly Writing Quickfire slot is ‘Independent bookshop or Amazon?’ and almost all our authors, agents and poets who answer this say they use both.

I’d love to say the same. But the truth is that I almost always buy books from my local Waterstones or from Amazon.

There, I’ve fessed up.




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We know that books can really suck, don't we? And not just collectively, when they're out with their mates. Sometimes particular books can suck, all on their own, in their own special way...


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If you follow Strictly regularly, you'll have noticed that we occasionally ask writers a series of Quick-Fire Questions, designed to get in amongst the nitty-gritty details of their writing lives.

This morning I decided to choose five questions to ask myself, with the idea of asking you, should you choose this mission, to do the same. Here are the questions and my answers:


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If you follow Strictly regularly, you'll have noticed that we occasionally ask writers a series of Quick-Fire Questions, designed to get in amongst the nitty-gritty details of their writing lives.

This morning I decided to choose five questions to ask myself, with the idea of asking you, should you choose this mission, to do the same. Here are the questions and my answers:


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If you follow Strictly regularly, you'll have noticed that we occasionally ask writers a series of Quick-Fire Questions, designed to get in amongst the nitty-gritty details of their writing lives.

This morning I decided to choose five questions to ask myself, with the idea of asking you, should you choose this mission, to do the same. Here are the questions and my answers:


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So I'm not really blogging, because I'm buried in Devon at the entirely wonderful Retreats for You. So here, instead, is a little taste of my walk this afternoon (after 2000 words, in front of log fire, before delicious supper NOT cooked by me).

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Angie began as an illustrator of children’s books and slowly moved into writing books for toddlers. Then she allowed herself to write what had been in her head for years: Septimus Heap. She is now on the last book of the series and has a film in the offing with Warner Brothers.


Writing the Septimus Heap books has changed my life by...
... allowing me to write full time, which I had wanted to do for quite a while. Also it has been great to find that I can create something that people feel an emotional attachment to. In my previous working life as an illustrator I felt I never quite managed to do that. And of course feeling financially secure has made a big difference!



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