David Kay's Blog

Fifty thousand words in June. That is my target. That’s five followed by four zeroes. Hmm, four is quite a lot of zeroes. Typically these Writing Months (or WriMo’s if you’re hipper than me) are for getting that damn manuscript finished. Fifty thousand is a decent chunk of words, and in a thirty-day

I worked out the ending to a short story the other night. It came to my while I was washing the dishes. Who said housework was uncreative! Thing is, I wrote the story six years ago. I was not happy with the ending, and neither was anyone who read it. I took all the other [...]

NaNoWriMO is over for another year. Who fell behind? I fell behind! Just call me Mister Eight Thousand. Sure I’ve been busy editing Blood Crossing all month, but surely I could have found a spare hour here or there to right? I looked here, I looked there, but no spare hour did I find. I [...]

The first sentence of your book is the first chance you have to engage your reader. You need to take that chance. If the first line doesn’t do a very good job of raising interest, will people read on to the second? You don’t need to craft the best line ever seen in the English [...]

You may or may not have read yet about the storm surge of opinion concerning Harlequin. Essentially, one of the largest US book publishers has moved from publishing worthy books to extracting money from hopeful ‘authors’ through a so-called self-publishing scheme. There’s a lot being said, so I’ll l

Karen Tyrrell has updated her blog with some good tips for writers. My two favourites: Conquer Procrastination …write EVERY day Don’t ignore SCENE STRUCTURE … In each scene, state the Character’s motivation upfront, Show opposition through another Character … Develop Conflict/Struggle climaxing with

The awesome Queensland Writers Centre (did I mention they are awesome) undertook a blog tour recently, asking a number of Australian authors the same questions. I decided to take a crack at answering them myself. For some reason they missed me out, what with this blog not existing then. Where do you

Third-hand information is still good information, right? This comes from Justine Larbalestier by way of Jason Nahrung. It’s important that you know this. Now to the point. It can be difficult, when writing a novel, to keep track of characters, time passing, and other structural issues. No longer! Ju

I need a blog. So many interesting things to post about, so little time to post in.