I haven’t done any of these for a while, so duck while I lob my backlog out there… This is an interesting question, because the resources needed vary depending on where you are in your career path. The information you need when you first begin (what exactly makes a compelling protagonist?) is very different from what’s wanted after you publish (where can I advertise my books?). So here are some sites that have been useful to me as I developed my writing and publishing skills. For writing: Mythic Scribes When you’re in the early stages of writing – your first book, or perhaps still dabbling with world-building – what you really need is a community of like-minded people. Even when you’ve read all the craft books, it can still be tricky to apply the advice to your own work. Should I introduce my antagonist earlier? Is this a punchy opening […]

This is a long question, so here it is in full: All of us write prose fiction (unless I’m mistaken) in an era that has an astounding variety of storytelling media. Has your writing been significantly influenced by any works of newer media? I think most authors writing today are heavily influenced by one particular form of media, and that is movies (and its baby brother, TV). Perhaps the advent of photography before that had some influence, in that ordinary people could record themselves, their surroundings and their lives, or send postcards to each other, so that authors no longer had to spend quite so much time describing the scenery. But movies and TV have  pushed authors into a more visual mode of writing, a snappier, scene-driven creation process. In even more recent times, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and video games with their set-piece battles and ever-more-challenging opponents […]