Andrew Jack Writing

Andrew Jack's Writing Blog

The Very Basics: Ten Things All Writers Need To Do

I get asked occasionally about where new writers need to start if they’re putting together a career in fiction. Other than telling them that learning the ins and outs of the English language (or whichever language you’re planning to write in) is a plan, I almost always giving them a version of this list. Remember [...]

Get Paid

“Always get paid!” I’m paraphrasing Harlan Ellison here. He added a few choicer words, so insert the expletives of your choice for added realism. He’s right though, if you’re trying to be a professional writer you should be getting paid.  Otherwise how will you buy food?  So, should you always demand payment? Mostly yes. It doesn’t have [...]

Finish It!

 One of the best pieces I’ve been given from Neil Gaiman. When I say I got it, an entire auditorium full of people got it too, and if you jump onto his site or youtube, you’ll be able to get it right form the source.  To paraphrase Neil, the advice can be summed up as [...]

Self Publishing Addendum: Money Now?

Inspired by this excellent post by Chuck Wendig: “Self Publishing: A Mother******* Checklist” (sort of NSFW if your boss is prudish about swearing), I wanted to clarify one of the main arguments for self publishing, and that’s the idea that by self publishing, particularly on Amazon’s Kindle, you can start making money right now. It’s [...]

Permission to write?

This post was inspired by Mur Lafferty of I Should be Writing. In her most recent podcast she pointed out that one of the greatest gifts a writer can be given is time, space and encouragement to write. She isn’t wrong (Mur is rarely wrong), often in our lives we have ten million other pressures [...]

Self Publishing? Part three: Huge support networks

Right, back to self publishing. There is really only one remaining set of people that can really look at self publishing, and that’s those people lucky enough to have a support network of marketers, advertisers (not the same thing), designers, web gurus and super ninjas. Note I said support network, not hired help. The ONLY [...]

The Anti – Library

I don’t have any news today, beyond the fact that the cat we have temporarily adopted is cute and fuzzy. Her name is Poppy. Whenever I go to the library I usually have an idea of the sorts of books I’d like to get out. However something I’ve started doing is grabbing books literally at [...]

Quick Writing Tip #2 Writing Fitness

Yes, I’m going to try and do these every day. Writing is like getting in/staying in shape. If you write today, writing tomorrow will be slightly easier, and it will also be slightly better. The longer you go without writing, the harder it will be to restart. Conversely, if you force yourself to write twelve [...]

Help Others, Help Yourself

Writing isn’t an easy job. For the countless hours that you put into your manuscript there’s absolutely no guarantee of a pay day. Even if you write a great book it might never catch on, or you might never even get published. Or, like me, you might find yourself in the middle of a MAJOR [...]

Sacrifice

My current project is stuck on 21,000 words. It’s not like I have writer’s block, in fact that would be a blessing since I know how to deal with it. I’m coming up against the uglier, more devolved version of writer’s block. I wish I had a name for it, but since it falls somewhere [...]

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