What's New From Me on Book-in-a-Week

I just realised it's been a few months since I've shared here what I've been writing for Book-in-a-Week.  For anyone who's missed my previous posts, I should probably explain that Book-in-a-Week is a fantastic web-based community of writers who once a month take part in a shared challenge to set and fulfil a writing goal over the course of a week.  As well as participating regularly, I also write a monthly column for the site.  

I've been thinking a lot recently about how I can fit in more writing time, and be more productive in my writing time, so two recent posts have been inspired by these experiments. The first post on this theme looks at developing a daily writing habit, which is advocated by many successful writers, including Stephen King.  You can read this one at http://www.book-in-a-week.com/2014/06/the-chain-method-to-writing-every-day/. Following on from this, I've also posted about the benefits I've found to keeping closer track of my word count when I write.  This one is here: http://www.book-in-a-week.com/2014/08/benefits-measuring-word-count/. 

In between the two, I posted in July about preparing for a writing conference.  This post can be found at http://www.book-in-a-week.com/2014/07/how-to-prepare-for-a-writing-conference/ and was inspired by conversations at the wonderful Romantic Novelists' Association conference.  This year the conference took place at Telford, and featured fascinating talks from a fantastic line-up of authors including Janet Gover, Jane Lovering and Rhoda Baxter.  Perhaps the most-talked-about talk, though, came from Nikki Logan, of the Romance Writers of Australia, whose book The Chemistry of Reading should probably be required reading for any commercial fiction writer - it's a fascinating exploration from a non-scientist's perspective of the science behind holding a reader's attention and engaging their emotions - and which writer wouldn't want to achieve that?