As Stephen King advised in his book On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” There’s great truth in this for fiction writers. To write well, you not only have to practice — to actually write — but you also have to … Read more
Sometimes it’s possible to read too much. Not horizontally — that is, too often, or too widely — but vertically. By which I mean reading too many books at once. If you’re as excitable and easily distracted as I am, you know the pain. You start off reading one, maybe two books — a fiction and … Read more
In the last Character Spotlight, we had a look at The Whitemaiden‘s protagonist and main POV, Catirna Elkela. Today you’ll meet the secondary POV — the young, cursed sage Axel Pavlekel. This would be the sage mentioned in the story blurb: When a young sage turns up in the woods, tortured and cursed, a disgraced healer must … Read more
Three languages in one poem? Can you do that? It was one thing, perhaps, to encourage you to write in a foreign language … but that was just one. If you write in three at a time, who will understand you? I admit I asked myself the same question before writing today’s poem. In the end, … Read more
I confess I’m not much into spring poetry. The idea that spring is the season of poets is a super-cliché, and in my case, it’s not all that accurate. For me, fall and winter are the poetic seasons. They’re the times of introspection and reflection — of turning inward. Spring and summer are the seasons … Read more