Letting go The time is approaching for me to upload my second Izzy Palmer novel to Amazon. It’s an incredibly tense moment and, with my first book “A Corpse Called Bob” my wife and I were up until three in the morning trying to make sure that it was perfect, that the files were correct and that we hadn’t accidentally undone something important that we’d done two hours before. The moment that we press upload is the culmination of months…

Loads of people want to be writers, but it’s actually quite hard. On rare occasions, when I’m flooded with inspiration, I can write six thousand words in one day. Far more commonly, I get a few hundred down on the screen then sit staring over the fields until new sentence comes to mind. Even when I’m productive there’ll be moments when I need something to distract me. It’s as if the inspiration I need has been placed in front of…

I’ve been writing kids’ books for about fifteen years now. I haven’t counted how many literary agent rejections I have received in that time but I can say that I’ve had about twenty full manuscript requests (so they’d liked the first few chapters enough to want to read more) and four or five agents asked for changes and wanted to see further drafts. In one case, I worked with agents over a six-month period before they decided they wouldn’t be…