Lorraine Wilson's Blog, page 7

A Christmas Book-buying Guide For All* Species Of Reader (*some)

Tis the season for the ‘Best Of’ lists, and rather than worry about whether I make anyone’s list, I figured I’d make my own. I read somewhere in the region of 150 books this year & so here are my fav reads of 2022 (not all published this year) and recommendations for Christmas presents for all your bookish relations. Enjoy & let me know what your top picks of the year have been.

For the literary darling: They’ve probably read the Booker Prize shortlist already so what do you buy for the r...

FantasyCon, book tours & the Scary 2nd Book

First up, the programme for this year’s FantasyCon has just been announced & I am delighted to be part of this event again. It’s been organised in no time at all by the amazing British Fantasy Society team after the original organisers cancelled it & I am in awe of the work that must be going on behind the scenes right now.

For anyone interested (and for me to screenshot so I don’t forget), my programme looks like this:

Saturday 17th September

4pm in Atlantis2 – Climate Fiction8pm in Di...

Novellas – Writing Up Instead Of Down

I wrote my first novella a couple of months ago, and am editing it now (not right now – now I’m procrastinating & it’s set in Iceland, so you’re getting random Icelandic photos. Sorry, I don’t make the rules). This being my first novella experience I did some reading around to see what people’s advice was about structuring them. Almost everything I found boiled down to ‘It’s like a novel, but shorter’. Which is … not entirely helpful. Especially when my starting point was a short story.

So, h...

The Dreaded Cover Letter

Covid has found the household and I can see my productivity slipping away, so to make myself feel like I’ve achieved something, I’m posting this! That counts as work, right?

Anyway … I’ve been looking at a fair amount of submission packages over the last few months, and have noticed some common patterns. So, on the offchance that you’re struggling with yours and are looking for a few pointers, here they are. (Please note, the internet is full of people offering advice on cover letters an...

Joy In A Time Of Darkness

When I drafted this blog, it was in celebration of the cover reveal of my second book, The Way The Light Bends, and aggravation at yet another sodding storm. But now as I revise it, there are much bigger things happening in the world than British weather or book covers. Hard, heart-breaking, scary, overwhelming things. I don’t know what to say about Ukraine, or the tory government, or the new IPCC report other than that I wish I could do more than I am. I wish the world was doing more. What ...

The Way The Light Bends

I am not entirely sure what has happened to the last few weeks. I’ve had this blog post on my list of things to do for … quite a while, and now suddenly it’s three weeks since a Very Exciting Announcement was made on the Luna Press website: the news that I have A SECOND BOOK coming out! *Cue pom-poms* It is called The Way The Light Bends, and you can read the Luna blogpost here, then read on for some more behind the scenes details…

As I say on the Luna blog, The Way The Light Bends is a v...

Brave New World

Last weekend I attended FantasyCon in Birmingham (see pics), The British Fantasy Society’s annual event. It felt like a brave new world for several reasons – the first in-person event now that we are in the (hopefully) latter stages of the pandemic, my first con, my first appearance on panels, hell, my first time meeting more than three people at once in 18 months. We were all venturing out of our caves into a new world that felt both daunting and hopeful, and I personally couldn’t have aske...

Diversity in Publishing, Mentoring, and Imposter Syndrome.

I was half way through writing a very different blog post last week when UK publishing had a rather drastic explosion on social media. I won’t go into the details but it started with someone commodifying the work of vulnerable children whilst writing about those children in terms that were racist, ableist, weirdly appearance-obsessed and basically pretty cruel; and ended with a very, very high profile white male author calling women of colour Taliban/ISIS terrorists for expressing (politely,...

The Faith & The Fear

I’m not entirely sure about this blog. I mean, basically it’s me crying ‘what if you don’t like me!’ into the void. Which is both slightly unattractive and plain daft. However, I think it’s a feeling a lot (all?) writers experience to some degree as launch day approaches (and after, but I’m living in a universe where ‘after’ isn’t allowed to exist yet). So let’s talk about it, shall we?

You see, this is all just a little bit scary. I wrote this book, you may have heard me talking about it. An...

Real Author Stuff & Spoons

May seems to have filled up with what my mind insists on calling Real Author Stuff. Namely, interview blogposts, a newsletter highlight, live & recorded reading events, and a book club visit. I’ll give you the details in a moment, first I’d like to squeal quietly at you, if that’s ok.

*me squealing*

I am loving it, in case you were wondering. Each one of these things is a shiny brass weight in the ‘Yes, you are an author’ half of the scales and a pigeon feather in the ‘haha, good joke, yes...