Author: Maggie Hamand

We are delighted to be launching our new anthology of creative writing from The Complete Creative Writing Course on Monday 2nd November at the Art Worker’s Guild at 5 Queen Square, Bloomsbury from 6-8.30.

This new anthology features 21 stories and novel extracts, covering a wide range of genres – literary, historical, fantasy, crime and science fiction.

We’ll be sending out the anthology to selected literary agents and independent publishers, and you can buy copies online from our bookshop.

 

This Friday, 18 September, Housman’s radical bookshop is hosting local writers Maggie Hamand and Elizabeth Carola who will read from their new works of fiction. Free wine and nibbles will be provided.

Housman’s bookshop is at 5 Caledonia Road, near King’s Cross station, and the event is from 7-8.30 pm.

Do come and join us! All are welcome.

Our week-long July Intensive Summer Workshop was a great success, and here is the group in the Groucho Club at the end of a great week of fun, exploration and learning. Comments on the feedback forms include: ‘Extremely instructive and helpful,’ ‘Fantastic week’, ‘Truly inspiring’, ‘Extremely illuminating’, ‘Very well structured,’ ‘Awesome!’ It was a great group who all worked well together and were generous in sharing their ideas and writing. It was a privilege to be part of such an outpouring of creativity! Our next week is coming up in the last week of August and I look forward to it very much.

Photo © Ian Caldwell

Natalie Butlin is our guest writer this week and she is dealing with a much-neglected topic – money tips for published and unpublished writers. Natalie is a freelance writer and until recently worked with Christine Green Author’s Agents.

I’ve been doing some personal financial sorting and it got me thinking about one of the biggest hurdles most new writers face: money! What you may not know is, even if you aren’t published, you could ease your finances a bit by talking to the taxman.

So often, people squeeze in writing around full-time jobs, or struggle to keep their heads above water on a part-time wage. Whatever your situation, a little more money in your pocket is likely to free up time and head-space to concentrate on thrashing out that first draft or polishing it for submission.
I have a wonderful accountant and claim back tax for all kinds of things I buy for my writing. I can do this because, while I write because I love it, it’s also a business. But it’s not only published authors who can present their writing costs as business expenses to HMRC. Here is an article about all of the things for which you could be claiming back tax.

From reading this, I have deduced you could potentially claim back the tax on one of Maggie’s wonderful courses, or suggest it to your boss as a tax-free benefit. What a good idea! Every job requires writing skills, doesn’t it?

Getting Serious!
I think one problem many new writers face is not being able to take themselves seriously. Because of this, they don’t make time to write, don’t prioritise it, and even feel guilty when picking up a pen or sitting at a computer. This doesn’t help you make any progress with your writing. Keeping a record of the costs involved in writing can help you to take it more seriously and approach it as any other job. Start keeping a file of receipts for anything you spend which you need or directly influences your writing – equipment, books, research, courses. As the article explains, you can only claim back for expenses if you intend your writing to be a source of income, and think it’s possible.

A Word of Caution
Perhaps if you saw your writing as a business, you might even become more disciplined. However, you don’t want to forget why you love writing, and should be wary of any epiphanies involving quitting your job, or writing what you think will make the most money. There’s never any guarantee of making money from your writing, and I believe you must write what you want to write – otherwise it usually doesn’t work. With this in mind, it is still always important to remember you are writing for an audience. Always ask yourself if it’s truly something you’d enjoy, even if it were written by someone else; who would be your perfect reader; and what makes each page gripping.

Some writers aren’t interested in writing for an audience. They write for pure personal enjoyment, and the idea of selling their work dirties the whole concept. But if being published or self-publishing is an ambition, you should take it seriously, and do what you can to support yourself in pursuit of this goal.

I’ll be running three free workshops at Swiss Cottage Library from 5-8pm fortnightly on Wednesdays 22nd April and 6th and 20th May. The workshops will be on starting, plotting and structuring, and then finishing and editing a short story. The workshops are being organised around the Cityread London2015 programme.
10 pictures that are part of the London Borough of Camden’s Art Collection will be on display in the library and you are invited to create your own short story of between 800 and 1200 words. You can either try to weave all the pictures into your story or just concentrate on a few. Send the stories to [email protected] and the stories will be loaded onto the website and some of the stores will be displayed in the Gallery along with the 10 pictures that inspired them!

I am publishing my new novel, Doctor Gavrilov, as an eBook and a paperback in January. It will be distributed to bookshops by Central Books and I’m doing a talk at the Broadway Bookshop, Broadway Market in Hackney on Friday 30th January.

It’s incredibly liberating and thrilling that it is now so easy to produce an eBook and also a high quality short print-run. My former business partner in the small independent Maia Press, Jane Havell, has done a fantastic job of designing the book jackets and interiors, and it has been such fun to be so closely involved in the whole production process – and being able to make all my own decisions.

I’m looking forward very much to launching the book next week. The jacket image is above. There’s a prize for the closest guess to what’s in the suitcase if you post a guess before publication day!

 

 

 

It’s that time when we review what we’ve achieved in the past year and think about what we hope to get done in the next. Why not write down your writing targets for the year ahead? Make these as specific and as challenging as you can. Yes, resolutions are often made to be broken – but in trying to meet them you can often get more done than if you had not set yourself a goal in the first place.

Your targets could be a number of words you want to write, or a number of stories or chapters, or to enter a certain number of writing competitions – anything you think you can achieve, even if its means a huge effort. And it will require an effort, because writing, as you all know, is never easy.

Above all, though, you must write what you want to write – because you want to write it. Don’t get caught in the trap of writing what you think other people want you to write, or what you think might get published, or what you think is fashionable at the moment. Just write whatever you are drawn to, however strange it might seem. Booker prize-winning author wrote a fantastic piece this recently in The Guardian which touches on this theme – you can read it here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/27/mental-tyranny-black-writers

So: happy writing, and I wish you all the best for a fulfilling and creative 2015!

 

Finally it’s here! It’s almost exactly a year ago that Mike Baker at Wiley asked me to write a follow-up to the successful Creative Writing For Dummies. It wasn’t exactly an easy journey, not least because, a short while after I started work, with a very tight deadline, I developed a very severe case of frozen shoulder which meant I was unable to use my right arm and couldn’t type – and was also maxed out on painkillers. I had to write much of the book using voice recognition software – an entirely new experience for me!

All For Dummies books go through a very rigorous editing process, and in addition, authors are now expected to get their own permissions for quoting extracts from other books. So it was very hard work indeed. However, it’s all done at last. The book is based on my 20 years’ experience of teaching creative writing, and is packed full of exercises which should help you on your writing journey and contains lots of tips and examples as well.

I want to give a special thanks to my Project Manager, Michelle Hacker, who was a star. And thanks also to Howard Cunnell for acting as Technical Editor and making such helpful suggestions in places, and Rachel Knightley who helped me hugely while I couldn’t type!

I’m launching the book at Waterstones, Islington tomorrow, 9 October, from 6-9pm. You can order the book from them, from Amazon (click here), or from any good bookshop.

 

 

We are delighted to be offering a free place on one of our writing courses to the winner of a Hesperus Press competition to write a haiku.

Hesperus Press are a brilliant independent publisher who publish fiction in translation. The haiku competition is to celebrate the publication of Denis Thériault’s The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman, a wonderfully quirky and original tale about a postman in Quebec who learns to write haikus.

The haiku competition is now open and you can enter at: http://bit.ly/1uyK32m

We still have a few places left on our September Weekend Workshop. This is for anyone with a writing project who wants some focused writing time and space to concentrate on their work. On this weekend, we will be looking especially at plot and structure, and there will be plenty of exercises to help you tackle problems and explore new ideas.

Do get in touch if you’d like to attend.