Glen sat down with Nyck Jeanes on North Coast Positive for an interview about his debut novel The Spirit of Love: a collection of short writings, poems and phrases written by a man who took himself into some of the darkest and most destructive depths one can go with drug and alcohol addictions. The collection of…
Mark Eyles, sat down with the Tasmanian Times to talk about his debut novel Mary’s Ireland: the battles of the Crimea and the streets of Belfast veil the simple life of young barmaid Mary Cannon. A Polish sailor, who lives in the shadow of Russian wars and religious conflict, enters her Shamrock Hotel. Mary feels his jade black…
Lannah Sawers-Diggins is the very talented author of Red Dust Dreams, a book that gives a voice to those living in the outback, revealing what life is really like ‘in the sticks’ through interviews, articles, and Lannah’s own experiences. She took a chance to spread Red Dust Dreams throughout the world and entered into the…
If you’ve written a novel, autobiography, or children’s book, Aurora House is currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts, and we’d love to hear from you! Now, some of you may be thinking you’d prefer to go with a ‘traditional’ publisher such as Penguin or Allen and Unwin, and it is still possible to submit unsolicited manuscripts to…
Consistency when writing a novel—actually, when writing anything—is an essential ingredient to creating a strong story. Your writers might get a little frustrated if you spend half the story telling them that your protagonist’s bedroom is the second door on the right and then suddenly start saying it’s the third door on the right, or…
Verbs are an essential part of any sentence, but not all verbs are created equal; there are two categories of verbs: weak and strong. Strong verbs should always be chosen over weak verbs. Strong verbs hold the power to grab the reader’s attention and convey exactly what is happening: creating mood and imagery in just…
If you’ve ever taken a writing course or read a book on how to write a novel, you would have been told ‘show, don’t tell’ at least once—perhaps several hundred times. But what exactly does it mean? Telling is when you tell the reader facts: what’s happening, how someone feels, even what’s about to happen…
Setting is one of the key ingredients to creating a novel that readers can immerse themselves in. Without settings, your characters would be aimlessly wandering around on blank pages talking to each other. The reader wouldn’t be able to experience the world the characters were in; they’d be more or less locked out. Avoid…
As a writer you’ve probably been told at one point or another to use active voice and avoid passive voice—perhaps it was even a teacher’s comment added at the end of a high school essay. If you’re anything like I was before I studied grammar, you probably scratched your head and thought what the heck…
Some people may try and tell you that creating characters for your novel is as easy as selecting an age, gender, hair colour, and goal. But it’s not that simple. If you want your characters to compel readers to care about them enough to read your entire novel, then you have to do a lot…
