Lorraine Wilson's Blog

Moving on

Hey all,

So to keep it brief, as I discussed last time, I am going to stop posting here on Substack and instead continue to post my articles on Patreon and on my Wordpress website.

Thank you for all your responses to my polls. The strong consensus was that most of you just want emails, so my priority was finding a decent platform that offered an email option whilst also not costing me too much money but offering me the structure I needed. Patreon, and maintaining the blogs on my website a little...

Preparing to leave Substack

Hi all,

So the seemingly inevitable is happening - I am having to look at moving this newsletter to a different platform. There are several reasons for doing this, and several more reasons why I’m reaching that decision now. But first, in case you don’t want to read all of that, a quick poll! Because I would love to keep as many of you fabulous readers as possible, I want to move to a platform that you like. Perhaps you have no strong opinions on newsletter hosts (I don’t either really!), but in...

Imagery, poetry and the defamiliar

This is an article that’s been requested by a couple of folk, and a longer answer to a question I’ve been asked at events as well. The question is usually along the lines of ‘how do you come up with the imagery in your writing?’

Now, to be asked that question at all is a huge compliment - I love that readers come away from my writing with even a trace memory of imagery or construed emotion. (I mean, there’s always the possibility what they actually mean is ‘what the hell are you talking about, i...

New projects, new fears

Hi hello fellow travellers,

I was intending to post an article today that’s been requested by a couple of readers, exploring how I approach imagery in my writing. That article is in fact mostly written, and (le gasp) has got quite long, so it’s coming. But this week I hit a bit of a new project mini crisis and I thought that might be an interesting thing to share, as it’s likely a fairly common phenomenon.

If you are anything like me, you have an ever-evolving list of shiny, delicious creative i...

Pre-order sale & reviewer ARCs

Hi friends,

I’m just sending this very quick update, outwith my normal schedule, to share a time-limited 25% discount on pre-orders of The Salt Oracle in a big Waterstones sale.

It runs from today (Monday 28th) to Thursday 31st, so you’ll need to get in there quick, but there’s a whole host of amazing titles on offer, so please do give the images a click and check the sale out. I’m just about to leap into a review copy of Ragwort, and if you like your fantasy dark and folkloric, full of voice an...

Diary - The Salt Oracle

Happy weekend, gorgeous creatures.

First a writing update. I’ve spent this week getting back into two half-planned projects and moving them both to the point where I can start drafting. They are wildly different books and one of them is slightly outside my wheelhouse (epic fantasy), so I should probably be concentrating on the one that would fit with my existing back catalogue. But also I’ve been on sub for 3 months and editing for a gazillion, and I suspect my brain might benefit from playing w...

Does momentum matter? Ep 2 - the slower writer

Welcome back to part two of this article. Last week I looked at ways we can navigate having a backlog of books or writing faster than the standard book-per-year trad pub rate:

This week, as I am in the dubious position of both having a backlog AND facing a publishing gap, I’m exploring the opposite issue - what you can do if you are facing slower publication timelines either because of complicated publishing tangles like mine*, or because you cannot write to the book-per-year timeline that trad ...

Does momentum matter? Ep 1 - the faster writer

Writing update: I’ve been on holiday (in the southern French Alps, it was a delight, scorpions appearing on my hand notwithstanding), but the long train journeys and some intensive working either side meant that this week I was able to hand back a hopefully-ready-to-sub revision of All The Birds Will Be Hostile to my agent, and check & send back page proofs of The Salt Oracle. Huzzah. Which clears the decks for me to return to the first pass edits of A Monstrous Theatre but I’m giving my brain a...

Dystopias, reality, and getting crabbit about labels

After a bit of a wash out of a week healthwise, I am editing this post whilst feeling a lil bit fragile, so please forgive any typos! Aside from spoonie stuff, I am just finishing copy edits of The Salt Oracle and awaiting agent edits of All The Birds Will Be Hostile. I paused a first edit pass of Monstrous Theatre to switch to copy edits so will be returning to that soon too. It's been slow going, I think because I dove into it as soon as I’d finished drafting rather than shelve it for a while....

Diary - We Are All Ghosts In The Forest

I just realised that the last Ghosts diary was prior to publication, with another post on publication day itself. And while the lead up to publication is a busy and perhaps interesting time to shed light on, the post publication journey of a book is much less talked about, and much less easily tracked. So I figured I’d do a wee update post on what has happened with this book in the six months after release - what that looks like in terms of author work, navigating awards seasons, and why asking ...