Andrew Jack Writing

Andrew Jack's Writing Blog

Noowhatsits? 5 Brain Boosting Supplements For Writers

I debated whether or not to write about this, but I always think it’s better to have more information rather than less.   Nootropics are a class of drugs and supplements which are used as “brain boosters” or cognitive enhancers depending on who you’re talking to. They range from the very mild and very common [...]

Writing What You Don’t Know

When you’re a writer you’ll hear the words “write what you know” more than almost anything else*…but is it good advice? Sadly the answer is, as always, “it depends”. It depends on whether or not you take the advice literally and write only what you know in real life or if you decide to use [...]

Borrowing From Mythology

One of the defining aspects of humanity is that we like telling stories. We tell stories to entertain each other, to teach each other and to scare each other. We’ve been doing it since Thag The Caveman told Zog The Caveman a story about the mystical god of giving Thag all the meat. Fortunately the [...]

Do You Need An Agent in 2012?

This is becoming a tough question to answer. If Doctor Who showed up in the TARDIS and whisked you and I back even three years I’d have said yes, you absolutely need an agent if you want a career as a writer. These days there are definite ways to make it without one. Perhaps a [...]

10 Hand to Hand Combat Myths That Writers Need To Stop Using

I like writing about fighting, it’s one of the few things I know a bit about. The one downside of knowing a bit about fighting is that when a writer who doesn’t tries to sound knowledgeable but doesn’t do their research the mistakes really stand out in the fight scenes. Here are ten of the [...]

Is Now The Best Time Ever To Be A Writer?

Depending on who you ask, we’re either living in a writerly utopia where we dance hand in hand with Amazon over fields sown with royalty cheques or we’re witnessing the end of publishing and fleeing Amazon as it realises its destiny as an eldritch abomination that wants all the good books to be sold for [...]

5 Ways Bad Reviews Can Help You

If you’ve ever had your work out in the public domain, you’ve almost certainly garnered yourself a bad review or two. These can range from professional reviews that question valid problems with your work to ranting, frothing diatribes that question everything from your parentage to your humanity. And it sucks. A bad review can make [...]

12 Basic Writing Mistakes I’ve Made and How To Avoid Them

1. Trying to write two books at once This pretty much never works. Very rarely you will hear about a professional author writing two books at once, but in my experience what they’re actually doing is writing one book while editing the other. A big part of why this is a problem is that it [...]

12 Twitter Tips for Writers

Twitter is one of those good idea/bad idea things. On the one hand it’s an amazingly powerful tool for setting up a platform and communicating with your readers. On the other it’s a time sink equal to any other on the internet and it’s quite possible to spend a day doing almost nothing but tweet. [...]

Writing Full Time: Ten Things to Think About Before You Go Pro

Almost every writer I know wants to be a full timer, I certainly do. It’s a very understandable dream, who wouldn’t love to stay home and do what we love to make a living? There are a few things you need to bear in mind as you work your way towards massive word counts and [...]

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