This episode is the second part of a conversation I had with Dr Sandra O'Donnell, founding partner of RO Literary. Sandra is a book coach and literary agent, and author of "Your first fifteen pages" an agent's guide to writing a novel that editors will publish and readers will buy. In this episode, we look at how the 'why' of your novel has to hook the reader, how character and place work with the inciting incident and Sandra gives us her advice on mastering 3rd person Point of View in the ensemble story. We also discuss three of the most useful tools a writer can use: Airtable, Grammarly, and Story Grid. ...
This episode is a conversation with bestselling author Peter F Hamilton. In a career spanning nearly thirty years Peter has published seventeen books as well as numerous short stories. He is known for his epic science fiction trilogies including the Void series from his Commonwealth Universe, and the Night's Dawn series from the Confederation Universe. In this conversation Peter talks about the formative literary influences on his life as he was growing up, the preparation he does before writing a million word epic, and why creating the bad guy is such fun. He also talks about the importance of consistency in creating setting, and the enduring power of space and space travel to generate a sense of wonder. ...
Fake news, and false information generally, are hot topics in the media at the moment. Fake news might offend us personally, but there's also a very good reason for us as writers to identify and avoid it. In this episode we look at fake news and some of its associated phenomena, like click bait, with insights from the International Federation of Library Associations and institutions. Their publication that I reference can be found here: https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11174 ...
