Always Chris

Is Self-Publishing Pants?

I really like saying things are “pants”, so I thought I’d slip it into the title for the hell of it. And it would seem a fair comment: self-publishing is bigger business now than it ever has been, and with the advent of e-books making a smash into the market – the Kindle recently outsold hard-back books on Amazon – it’s the perfect time to ponder this question. A question that divides people in many more ways than one, and More

Commas For Dummies

I’ve looked and I’ve looked and I’ve searched and I’ve searched but from what I can tell there is no book out there for how to use just commas correctly. Well, you might think, that’s because the comma is just one of the many things that a writer must concern him or herself with on a daily basis.

To this I would say, “Well, there should still be a book just about commas!”

Why? Because commas are crucial and More

Writing & Arrogance: The Eternal Conundrum

Ever since I started writing, people have asked me “why do you write? Surely it’s a bit arrogant to assume that the entire World wants to read what you have written and that anyone but you might want to hear what you have to say”. As you can imagine, when you’ve just been labouring away on your novel for the last three years, spending each and every evening more or less attached to your computer, these words (coming from the More

Seeing It Right

This post is all about how you look at a manuscript and how other people see it. In other words, this article is a serious news-flash to people who are just starting out on the serious writing endeavour.Turn the TV off, forget that Fosters Beer Advert and pay attention you at the back!

The horrible truth, you see, is that YOU see your manuscript as a beautiful piece of work, while other people see all the faults that you have More

We Don’t Like You

When I hear someone say “I’ll never be able to write a novel,” or “I’ll never find time to write a novel, but if I did it would be great,” I half want to laugh and I half want to cry. There is this idea that writer’s produce their work in wood cabins, listening to music, spending day after day walking through the woods pondering their ideas before finally blowing the world away. But you never hear about the writer’s More

Harness The Knowledge

As a child, I detested learning; it was only many years later when I learned that I didn’t detest the actual process of taking information in at all – it was more the way it was happening: the being stuck in a class-room, the being told to remember, the pressure. It might not seem like much when you’re an adult, but looking back, they expected an awful lot of us children, who in essence had not long stopped running around More

How To Test Yourself

As a writer, I am prone to talk about writing with people. Let me say now that I realise 100% how annoying that can be. The reason should be obvious: writing may be important to me, but I am more than well aware that to most other people it rarely crosses their mind. In that respect it’s like talking about how the surface of the Moon looks with someone who is both deaf and blind (not to self: More

Write A Novel The Easy Way

If you’ve just read the title of this post and thought “this is what I’ve been looking for for ages!” then you, my friend, are sadly going to be very disappointed. You may even have to lock yourself away for a few days and have a damned good cry, and who knows it might help a bit. The unfortunate truth is that all those web-sites out there that proclaim to help you write a novel in three weeks, etc, are…How More

Style Guidelines: Presenting A Manuscript

As with how you tie your running shoes , or how long you boil your spaghetti for, there are a number of different ways you can prepare your manuscript, though only one looks right to everyone (this is assuming an agent or publisher has agreed to read your hard copy, of course). And don’t snigger, you at the back who thinks I sound pedantic and trivial: if you’re a writer and you don’t know how to present your novel, what’s More

Going Professional

In the world of writing, I hear a lot of people saying “what separates a professional writer from an amateur?” And it’s a very difficult question to answer. Sometimes, it seems as though everyone else knows the answer to this except you…

In most trades, the definition of “professional”can easily be applied to someone who makes their money that way. It keeps things simple, having just one definition. But writing is different to most other professions. Technically, a writer can More