Roz Morris's Blog, page 57
June 16, 2015
‘Sleaze, self-obsession and sentimentality’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Garry Craig Powell
My guest this week brings a distinct tone of mischief. His novel is a short story cycle about a series of characters who are struggling in the male-dominated society of Dubai. Six of the stories were directly inspired by music, but not in the way you might expect. Phil Collins puts him in mind of […]
‘Janys in Venice, Tina in Canada, EJ in New Mexico…’ – global audience for our writing radio show
Our show on Surrey Hills Radio just got this lovely write-up on a new website, This Is Wild. I’m not sure how we fit the wild agenda, but the interviewer has cited our enthusiasm for all things of publishing, our robust arguments about how you pronounce the Norrell of Jonathan Strange and our music collection. […]
June 14, 2015
How I cope with writers’ RSI – and when your books come back to haunt you
It was final revision time on Lifeform Three. I’d been living at the computer, desperate to spend every moment with my book. And one morning I woke up unable to move my right arm. To be truthful, I could move it, but it hurt so much I preferred not to. Reaching for my glasses left […]
June 11, 2015
The Masque of the Red Death discussed at Literary Roadhouse – podcast for literature lovers
If you’re friends with me on Facebook you’ll already have seen this picture. Years ago I held a fancy dress party with the theme ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. My costume was The Masque of the Red Death, after the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Well this week, I was the guest of The […]
June 9, 2015
‘Stay close to sounds that make you glad to be alive’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Chris Cander
My guest this week is crossing her fingers as her agent sends out her third novel. It’s called The Weight of A Piano, so you can probably see why she fits very well here. All of her fiction is heavily shaped by music behind the scenes, from a song about a widowed woman that presented […]
June 7, 2015
A wrong cover and a revamp – case study of rebranding an indie novel
You know my bookseller friend Peter Snell, of Barton’s in Leatherhead? (He’s the co-host of our Surrey Hills Radio show So You Want To be A Writer.) Peter is a staunch supporter of indie authors, and he mentioned to me that he’d been talking to an indie writer I know who wanted advice on revamping […]
June 2, 2015
‘Somewhere in time’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Gwendolyn Womack
My guest this week has a novel that spans several lifetimes and puts a new spin on reincarnation – she blends thriller with romance and the supernatural with her story of neuroscientists who have unlocked the secret of reincarnation. She used music to conjure her kaleidoscope of time periods, from ancient China to the modern […]
May 31, 2015
Conquer the blank page – and a way to beat writer’s block
When you sit at the keyboard (or seize your writing irons), how certain are you about what you’re going to write? I’m a big fan of plans, but sometimes they’re frustrating. We know the next point in the story but can’t get the characters there. We need to set up a development and it won’t […]
May 26, 2015
‘Into the warzone’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Alison Layland
My guest this week is tackling the Croatian conflict of the early 1990s, and she used music to suggest fragments, atmospheres and moments of memory. When she sent me her post, she remarked that she found the process of writing it had been even more challenging than the novel, as she had never before admitted […]
May 21, 2015
2 days to get 7-novel box set – the band is about to split
Remember us? The band is about to split. Our magnificent seven will soon scatter. The box set containing our seven novels will evaporate at the stroke of midnight BST on Saturday 23 May. We might even resume our normal colours. Here’s a post that explains the box set experiment. Here’s one where we were asked […]
