Andrew’s Blog:
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Why Hemingway decided you should never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
Journeys don’t always work out the way we think they will. When F. Scott Fitzgerald invited Ernest Hemingway on a short trip from Paris to Lyon, Hemingway jumped at the chance. Fitzgerald was the more established novelist at the time and Hemingway saw it as a chance for two writers to spend some agreeable time…
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How the architecture of Queenslander houses influenced the plot of Crossing Live.
Some of the key scenes in Crossing Live take place in or around the home of Roland Kendall. His house isn’t described in detail in the book – I wanted to leave it as much as possible to the reader’s imagination. But a reader who isn’t familiar with Queenslander houses recently asked me about the…
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Using Google Docs and Google Drive to stay productive when you’re away from your desk.
A recent change in work routine means that I’m away from my laptop for much of each day. This has forced me to look for new ways of staying productive during those many small moments when I could be writing. Last week, I wrote about an experiment with speech-to-text dictation using Google Docs on my…
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Is dictating the new writing? Can speech-to-text engines help you talk your way to a novel?
Thanks to speech-to-text engines it’s now possible for anyone with a smartphone to become one of the great dictators. Not the testosterone-fuelled – my rocket is bigger than your rocket – kind of dictator. I’m talking here about writers who use dictation to speak their way to a story. Dictation was once the preserve of writers…
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Using Pinterest’s Sections feature to segment your novel’s board by scene
Pinterest’s Sections feature now allows you to easily structure any Pinterst board. If, like me, you create boards for each of your novels, you can use this new feature to segment the board into parts or scenes.
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Touching the sea again at Honfleur
Three months into her tandem journey around France, Catherine Pringle reaches the English Channel when she arrives at Honfleur in Normandy. It’s late summer now and the weather is turning colder. She is tempted to mark the return to the coast with a symbolic dip in the Seine Estuary. But, as ever with Catherine, food…