If you’ve got a spare couple of hours on your hands and you’ve decided you want to write something – but aren’t working on any project – how would you start writing? Do you have a favourite starting point for writing? Do you have a writing exercise that you do for fun

Well, our First Line short story competition is officially closed. I have to say that I’m suitably impressed with the amount of people who chose to enter – certainly more than I expected for our first competition. So thank you to everyone who sent in a story.

here is some information about the calculations you’ll need to do if you’re looking at putting your book into bookstores.

n every day life almost all of what we know and assume is absorbed through what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell. The challenge though is that we all have a primary sense, a few that are average and one sense that definitely lags behind.

Listening to Karen Kotze, owner of the Bodhi Tree book cafe, talk about about how to get your books taken on by book stores, one thing became incredibly clear …

I’ve never really been one of those people eagerly searching for quotes. I like to have them on hand in case they emphasis a point I’m making in my writing, but you won’t find me regularly flicking through the enticing gift books that seem so popular. Which is what makes this week’s book purchase all the more strange

Much of the promotion of e-books is based on the e-publishers’ ability to make the digital version look like the paper version. Yet now, just as we are starting to accept that e-books are here to stay there has been a new advancement.

Looking for something fun to do this weekend? How about a drive down to Bridgetown for the Words in the Valley Writer’s Festival?

Many people, when starting out, think that the hard part about creating and self-publishing a book is the writing itself or maybe the process of self-publishing. Yet, in all honesty, I would have to say that both of these pale in comparison to promoting and distributing your own book

Now I have to admit to not using hot water for laundry, I rarely water the lawn (and it shows), I put plants under taps that refuse to stop dripping, etc, but it does occur to me that as a writer I’m in a business that requires paper and in most cases electricity to write on it.