If you have read The Planet Baggers and are a fan of my style of humour then, whilst you patiently await The Space Hoppers, perhaps I could point you in the direction of a series of short humorous stories based on the fictional alter-ego of the singer, Katie Melua. Anyone Read more…
It seems a lot of writers have trouble coming up with names for their characters. Thankfully, I’ve never had any trouble doing that—it’s the story itself that gives me sleepless nights. Telling you that names just pop up in my head isn’t much use to you, so I thought I’d Read more…
Many people find writing poems and lyrics difficult. So here’s my tip—keyword brainstorming.Say you wanted to write a song about being dumped via a text message. Identify the keywords—in this case “text” and “dumped”. Then for each one make a synonym and rhymes list. First, write down any synonyms or Read more…
My search for the holy grail of text editors, the one app to rule them all, seems to be never-ending. The trouble is that I may be expecting too much from one piece of software—I want an attractive distraction-free editor with enough functionality to write blog posts and novels but Read more…
If you want to be good at anything in life it pays to use the best tools and equipment you can get. The words “budget” and “value” should not be on your radar when it comes to choosing the tools of your trade. That is why I bought a MacBook Read more…
No. Next question. Oh, all right then, let’s think about it a bit more. After all, AI is advancing all the time. Surely if a computer can drive a car then it can write a song. There are already examples of computer-generated art and literature. Well, for a start, I Read more…
A while ago I discussed alternate ways of writing blog posts without having to use the awful WordPress web interface (and the even worse replacement, Gutenberg). I mentioned a word processor called Write! which is able to publish to WordPress. But it has a major drawback – it can’t handle Read more…
Now that I use tools like Scrivener and Grammarly for my writing it got me thinking about A.I. In particular, could a computer ever write fiction? After all, we are beginning to see computer-generated art and music. Remember the Turing test, where a computer would be able to hold a Read more…
In my younger days I wasn’t a great fan of poetry. I found it hard going, requiring more effort to understand than I was prepared to expend on it. Then I stumbled upon Haiku. I met a Japanese girl at University and she changed the way I thought about a Read more…
Distraction-free writing. It is something many writers crave, and a ton of apps have appeared on the scene to fill the need. But here’s the thing — it is already built in to Scrivener under the guise of Composition Mode.The problem with some of these apps is that they hang Read more…