Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved fairy tales, myths, legends, and fantasy. It’s something I responded to instinctively as a young reader, and something I took to easily as a young writer, too. In my imagination and my dreams, journeying to those magical worlds seemed to me as natural as breathing. Of course I [...]

15 Comments »

January 1st marks the official release day for Sophie Masson‘s latest YA novel published in Australia, The Romance Diaries: Ruby (ABC Books, Harper Collins, available both as paperback and e-book). We’re so pleased she’s with us today to tell us a little more about it, and give us some extra inside scoop, following our Take [...]

7 Comments »

Therese and Kath sneaking in for a second to say Happy Thanksgiving to our U.S. readers! As it’s heading into the festive season, I want to do something a bit special this month, and look both back and forward to the joys of childhood holiday reading, in both my own words and those of three writer [...]

9 Comments »

Last month I wrote about the major, extreme types of fictional characters, the heroes and villains. Today I want to briefly make some observations about the minor kinds of characters known as ‘sidekicks’ (often used to denote good characters, but sometimes neutrally) and ‘henchmen’(used only to denote minor bad characters). Firstly though it’s important to [...]

10 Comments »

Heroes and villains–they’re of course at opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of characters, but they share more than might be obvious at first glance, and if you’re in the business of writing fiction and creating such characters, it can be useful to think about those things. Of course, the principal element that heroes [...]

15 Comments »

As readers of Writer Unboxed know, I’ve recently launched myself into a bit of an adventure through founding my own micro-publisher, Sixteen Press. My first Sixteen Press e-book, a collection of my fantasy/supernatural short stories for a crossover readership (adult and young adult) titled The Great Deep and other Tales of the Uncanny, is now [...]

14 Comments »

As readers of Writer Unboxed probably already know, fairytales are a big inspiration for me, and elements of fairy-tale creep into a good many of my novels. However, it’s been a while since I’ve written a novel that was very firmly in fairy-tale territory, based directly on a famous fairytale, and doing so has made [...]

18 Comments »

Childhood books are so powerful. They can imbue us with a passion for something unexpected, but whose effects are lifelong. And sometimes, when you look back, you can see the precise moment when it happened, the exact story that turned you on to something deep and important. I was thinking about that recently—I’m in the [...]

24 Comments »

Like most writers, whether new or established, I have folders—physical and electronic—filled with stories that either never quite got to publication but that your instinct tells you are still worth something; or else were published long ago and whose details might be a bit dated, yet whose core is still strong. These aren’t dead stories, [...]

15 Comments »

I want to do something a bit different today. My new book The Boggle Hunters, a fantasy adventure novel for kids aged 8-12 has just come out this month in Australia (Scholastic Press Australia) and I want to talk about the sheer magic of creating this book and the fun I’ve had creating a new [...]

12 Comments »

Prologue: Eureka moment, inspiration strikes. A new idea! Great excitement. Connections made in head, some scribbling in notebook. Floaty yet intense feeling, like being in love. Can’t think of anything else. Tingles up spine, gooseflesh, daydreams as the idea grows from little spark to fast-burning fire. Weird looks from people as novelist goes about muttering, [...]

28 Comments »

The proverb says, Don’t judge a book by its cover, but whoever dreamed that one up can’t have been working in the publishing industry. It might be an indictment of human shallowness, but you can’t help first impressions. You will not judge a book by its cover once you’ve read it, of course; but first [...]

26 Comments »