You know on The Voice, singers have only 90 seconds to wow Adam Levine and get him to turn that chair? Well, it’s the same with writing. You have about 90 seconds on page one to wow an agent/publisher/mentor/reader and get them to turn their attention to your manuscript. I learnt this in Pitch Wars (and a few other forms of…
Tag: books
A rare snippet on parenting – Picky Eaters
I hardly ever write about parenting. Mainly because I am terrified my girls will grow up to become writers and take revenge. What if they write about me like Alexandra Fuller did? She wrote, in her mum’s words, “that awful book”, Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight (because mother is already there?) and she exposed the full depths of her…
Book Review – Barbarian Days – A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
The prose in this book is sublime, pure poetry in places. William Finnegan (author of many other books and columnist at The New Yorker) is a skillful, lyrical writer and his words are a pleasure to read. He is able to take essentially indescribable experiences and bring them to life with beautiful words. He achieves this in such a way that you, as the reader,…
Writing and Publishing are like Apple Pie
Don’t get me wrong. Writing and publishing are not as easy as pie. Nothing could be further from the truth. But writing a book can be like baking apple pie for a tea party. The crowd at the event are the publishers and agents. High flyers. You buy ingredients and you slave over a hot stove. You produce a great homemade pie.…
Between the books with Pamela
I’ve just read Things Unseen, a compelling psychological thriller by Johannesburg based author, scriptwriter, vlogger and Tweeter extraordinaire, Pamela Power. It is published by Clockwork Books. I loved the book, it kept me up at night and guessing right till the end. You can catch up with my review HERE on Goodreads. I caught up with Pamela during the week.…
#PitMad 2016
I entered #Pitmad (and #PitchWars) in 2014 with another manuscript (that I thought was AWESOME). I tweeted, I queried, I cried and I begged, but it was to no avail. So I did some thinking, I took the lessons learned from the contests and the gems gleaned in the rejection letters and I polished them up, nice and shiny so…
10 things I learned in the query trenches
I’m super stoked that I have signed a publishing contract with Literary Wanderlust (a Denver, Colorado based traditional publisher) for my manuscript, A Fractured Land. But the process was not easy. I learned some lessons along the way. If you are in the query trenches, these might help you Twitter is important. The writing community there is warm and…
