Alison Morton | Alison Morton Author

Writing Challenge Day 27: What's your favourite trope?

Strictly, a literary trope is a rhetorical or figurative device, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect. Today, it’s also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices and motifs in creative works.

Right, now we’ve got the formal stuff out of the way, let’s look at how it […]

Writing Challenge Days 25 & 26: Favourite books as adult and as a kid

I really dislike this one. Well, perhaps not the second one about childhood books as I’m no longer a kid and can give you a definite answer.

Beloved children’s books Heidi by Joanna Spyri The Children of the New Forest by Captain Marryat What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge The Eagle of the Ninth by […]

Writing Challenge Day 24: What to write next?

Ah, well, that’s a bit in the air…

I’m now 20,000 words into my new Roma Nova novel, so I have a good 60,000 words and a mountain-high pile of research. That will see the year out, I think.

Depending on what happens next in the book world, next I might take up writing […]

Writing Challenge Day 23: What did you write last?

This blog post 😉

Okay, that’s a cop-out answer. If this means ‘real’ writing, it would be a (long) short story. But before I reveal more about that, let me digress.

Writers write a variety of stuff, not only their published stories. in the past few weeks, I’ve written a slew of blogposts for this […]

Writing Challenge Day 22: What's your current word count?

Word count is something writers can and do obsess about!

In fact, it can become a tyranny which I wrote about here. (There are cats and orangutans.)

The new Roma Nova book I’m working on (introduced here) is progressing steadily, if slowly. Word count is now up to 18,000 words, double what it was on […]