RETALIO | Alison Morton Author

Writing Challenge Day 20: Characters' favourite food (and drink!)

Hm, an interesting one…

Let’s start with drink. Carina lives on coffee; she was brought up for her first 24 years in the Eastern United States (EUS) and like many office workers in the early 2000s, she drank industrial amounts of it.

On the way to my desk next morning, I grabbed a […]

Does diversifying your writing offer a book marketing advantage?

At the Triskele LitFest

It’s generally accepted that it’s easier to market a series of novels than separate, stand-alone ones.

It’s also more fun to write as you can introduce more entanglements and conflicts across several books. 😉

But if you already write a novel series you can expand their reach further by […]

Conflicting emotion

Conflict and emotion are two pillars of fiction writing whether in high-end literary fiction or the most melodramatic genre fiction.

A story will often start by providing the main character with a conflict, be it professional or personal. Sometimes it’s the place where the initial event is set (weather, nighttime, urban, with unlit streets), a […]

How to write a 'damnèd, smiling villain'

Octavian (Author photo) Shakespeare’s Young Octavius

O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain! My tables—meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain— At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. (Hamlet, Wm.Shakespeare)

“And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear, […]