It might feel as though it’s the wrong time of year to be focusing on endings. Surely, January is for opening lines not closing ones?...

When I first started writing, I was one of those people who naively think that writing is easy. I had an idea for a story. Inside my...

I love historical fiction. History is vast and within that vastness, there’s an endless possibility for stories. Every time period, every...

Writing competitions are funny things. For me, there is a slight dissonance between producing a piece of art and asking someone to judge...

It always feels uncomfortable, to me, to talk about money. It is an essential part of modern life. We need money to buy food and clothes...

Over the past couple of years, I’ve provided feedback and line edits on over a thousand short-fiction pieces from microfiction to...

A review of “Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash” (Michael Loveday, Ad Hoc Fiction) from a teacher’s perspective Before I started reading...

Every so often, I like to go off on a bit of a rant about writing rules. We’re all aware of them, these seemingly gold-plated...

When we talk about the key ingredients that go into a story, one thing that is usually stipulated as essential is the need for conflict....

Over the past couple of years, I’ve provided feedback and line edits on over a thousand short-fiction pieces from microfiction to...

Five Strategies for Making Characters Come to Life When I’m critiquing short fiction, especially flash fiction, a feedback comment I...

Since we’re in the opening few days of a brand new year, I thought it might be appropriate to write about opening lines in fiction. Where...

When I made the decision a year and a bit ago to launch an online course on the topic of lyrical writing, I thought in a best case...

I often see flash fiction writers talking about how difficult it is to come up with titles for their stories. They’ve done all the hard...

This is likely to be a ramble. I’ve sat down to write this blog post too many times to count and I’ve never managed to make it to the...

Reading is reading, right? We learn to read when we’re little and, once we’ve got the hang of it, it’s pretty much a skill ticked off the...

I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching just recently about where I’m at as a writer. Over the last year, it has felt a bit like I’ve...

The idea of taking a well-known story and putting a new spin on it is nothing new. If you look at Shakespeare as an example, very few of...

In our modern world, we are so often defined by labels – our nationality, our skin colour, our gender, our sexuality, our age, our...

At the end of last year, I was lucky enough to take part in a wonderful workshop led by Gaynor Jones called "Go Weird or Go Home." Its...