Fi Phillips

It's half term holiday here and I've crept out of bed early (although not as early as I normally get up during term time) to have a little peace before my family rise. Being an only child, I had a lot of me time, usually spent reading or imagining. It's nice to carve out a little occasional quiet solitude for myself nowadays, and just be. Sometimes the torrent of writing advice available online and in books can be too much which is why I found this article, Oblique Stategies for Authors by Stephen Blackmore , incredibly useful and inspiring too.

How do you promote yourself online? Or do you? For a long time, my online presence was purely the website for my murder mystery script writing business - no blog or Facebook page, just the website itself. What this prevented me from sharing, however, was the people behind the business - the personality of myself and my co-writers. My existing clients knew who I was through our communications but anyone coming fresh to the website had no idea. There was no connection and hence no reason to choose our scripts over anybody else's. That changed when  I set up a blog for Murdering the Text. Suddenly I could talk about why our plays and ways of operating would suit customers over other companies. I could chat to my customers, share our and their successes, and let them know of new scripts and so on. This created a whole fresh level of communication. What I also took from the new blog was the realisation that I wanted to share more about my writing in general so I set up this blo...

It was my seventh wedding anniversary yesterday. We had a romantic evening in (well, as romantic as it can be when you're trying to settle a child in bed) - meal cooked by my husband, a bottle of bubbly and Captain Corelli's Mandolin on the TV - bliss. The champagne hangover I suffered this morning wasn't so blissful, which is why this post is later in the day than usual. Be kind to me - I'm feeling fragile. As my life is so often a juggling act (children, work, some kind of social life), I sometimes struggle to meet my writing goals so I was delighted to discover a free online tool to help me keep up my progress - Pacemaker . Choose your word count, intensity level and weekend writing plans and this program will create a customised writing schedule for you. I started to use it the day I found it and have to say that it's proving incredibly useful.

I was a reader long before I was a writer. As an only child to older parents, I was allowed to read whatever book, out of the many crammed shelves in our home, took my fancy. I read thrillers, fairytales, history, plays, poetry - making no differentiation between genre or form. As a writer now, I continue to read. I don't just read what I write though (plays, murder mysteries, fantasy). I do my best to stretch my reading choices to other less familiar genres too. This is what I've read over the last six months. The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie I came to Titania Hardie through her books on witchcraft. She has a very calm writing voice so I was excited to buy her first adult fiction book. The Rose Labyrinth is a historical mystery featuring Elizabethan spies and geniuses, a family legacy and the long, hot summer of 2003. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell This non fiction book discusses Campbell's theory of the journey of the archetypal hero as ...

It's a bitterly cold morning but the sky is a wonder of gold, lilac and pink. Not a bad way to start the day. When you're feeling down, I think it's always a good idea to look up (literally). One of my writing inspirations is Neil Gaiman - his unusual imaginings and his diversity in writing covering comic books, novels, children's books, films and now a game - so I was delighted to come across this podcast, Neil Gaiman's Advice to Aspiring Writers on brain pickings. Another writer I love to listen to (and read the books of too of course) is Steven Pressfield. As part of the launch of his latest writing advice  book, The Authentic Swing (which I'll be reviewing here soon) is this Q&A podcast, Ask Me Anything .

We are several weeks into autumn and the weather has turned cold where I live. My garden, however, refuses to obey the call of this season and is still decked in flowers that were meant to bloom in the summer. My daughter is a child of nature, especially hunting out insects (or mini beasts as she calls them). The many butterflies that visited our garden this summer have gone but we found these two caterpillars in amongst our flowers a couple of days ago. It seems to me that they are outside of their normal time. The concept of someone or thing being outside their normal time or setting is used again and again in stories - the stranger, the time traveller, the alien. It probably stems from the time centuries ago when we kept to our tribe and outsiders were seen as dangerous. What does the idea of 'other', of an individual outside the time or place they originated in, mean to you? Are they good or bad or something in between? Is the story about them or the reaction of othe...

I'm currently working on the third draft of my novel - rewrite, tinker, expand, delete - and I'm actually finding it more difficult than producing the original draft. Thankfully writer Chuck Wendig has come to my rescue with his article 25 Steps to Edit the Unmerciful Suck out of your Story . And finally, Benedict Cumberbatch says...

I've recently finished a new murder mystery play called Thoroughly Murdered Millie . Set in the 1920s, rich young widow Millie Harper-Smythe shocks her family (and the staff) with her plans for the future. Her stepchildren will lose their home, William the butler has no choice but to emigrate and who knows what she has in mind for the gardener? Can anyone stop her? You can find this play over on the Murdering The Text website. Have a look .

Woken at 5.26 am by my neighbour whistling loudly at her dogs for about quarter of an hour, I am now yawning my way through the morning. Don't Die at the End! from Writerly Life discusses a similar lack of energy on the part of authors when they reach the stage of sending off their manuscripts to agents and publishers. It discusses how to shift our energy and keep going.