Writing life | Alison Morton Author

Villains and writers –The author is not the character

Conflict is the lifeblood of any fiction whether it’s between characters, between a character and their conscience, between the character and their environment. Obstacles abound, fate seems inexorable, bad characters never seem to give up.

Character is shown via actions and dialogue which shine a light on their values and motivations. Caius Tellus in my […]

The terror of writing

You stare at the stodgy sentences. You can’t think what words to write next. You are starting to bore yourself. Your characters are boring each other. Nobody will want to read this drivel.

And so it goes round and round in your head.

You’ve written ten novels or none. You’ve won prizes or you’re just […]

10 years of indie publishing – why?

When I set out in 2010 to find out what to do with the 90,000 words I’d bashed out in 90 days, I didn’t have a clue about the publishing world. A business friend, Denise Barnes, also a novel writing beginner, guided me towards the Romantic Novelists’ Association who has a mentoring scheme for new […]

How to get through the fog of 2022 into 2023

Let’s face it – 2022 has been a weird year.

Coming out of the strict Covid regulations and try to recover a ‘normal’ (ha-ha!) book life, I planned a busy year. And so it turned out:

On 3 January, I published my husband’s fantastic book File of Facts about using personal organisers. (He is […]

Books I've read in 2022

As in 2021, reading books has given me enormous pleasure. This year, I published a historical fiction story, JULIA PRIMA, set in AD 370, the first foundation story to my Roma Nova thriller series, but in this post I’m writing as a reader.

This is not a beauty contest or a selection. The list […]