Evie Wyld is Booktrust's third online writer in residence.

  • The thrill of victory, the agony of my feet

    Posted Tuesday April 28th 2009
    by Patrick Ness

    The last week has been busy, even by my bee-like standards, hence the slightly longer-than-usual delay between blogs.

    Much of the week has been very, very good indeed. I did a couple of events, including one at the London Book Fair and another really great one at a school in east London. I was also shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for The Knife of Never Letting Go, and also found out I won the very classy James Tiptree Award for the same book.

    These are just brilliant things, and I feel privileged and honoured to be part of them. The Carnegie in particular is fantastic because of how many schools participate in shadowing schemes whereby they read the whole shortlist. Just imagine, thousands of students reading these books and debating them at length. Great stuff.

    But mostly my week has been taken up with the London Marathon, which I ran on Sunday. Now, I not only finished, I managed a new PB. But thar be a tale, involving large amounts of blood ...

    Things were going well on an unseasonably hot day, and I was chugging along at a decent pace. I was hitting my targets and…

    Read the rest of this post Comments (0)

  • New writer's tips up

    Posted Sunday April 19th 2009
    by Patrick Ness

    Just a quick note to say that I've put up a new set of writer's tips, this time on trying not to despair (well, as little as possible anyway).

    More soon...

    Read the rest of this post Comments (1)

  • Little red marks, thousands of 'em

    Posted Sunday April 12th 2009
    by Patrick Ness

    It’s the literary equivalent of trimming your nose-hairs before a dinner party. Actually, not quite true, it’s more the literary equivalent of your mother asking if you’ve trimmed your nose-hairs.

    I’m talking, of course, about the copy-edit, where your book gets its final, final – and we do mean final – polish before walking out the door into the world. It’s your last chance to make sure you don’t have loo roll dragging from your shoe.

    Now, I’m still in the midst of a second draft, as well as the tapering days of marathon training, so the arrival of a copy-edit in the Saturday post (between Good Friday and Easter, no less) was a bit of a surprise. Not because someone made a mistake, but because I’d completely forgotten that Candlewick, my American publishers, need to have my approval for their version of The Ask and the Answer.

    Authors differ on this, but I don’t actually mind the copy-edit at all. All the hard work is done, all the big tough editing decisions discussed and put away, and instead, someone is telling you in extensive red pencil that you’ve lost track of your dependent clauses here or left out…

    Read the rest of the post Comments (1)

  • What Haruki Murakami keeps prattling on about

    Posted Sunday April 5th 2009
    by Patrick Ness

    First off, let me say how much I appreciate the feedback I’ve been getting, particularly a lovely comment like Gail Jackson’s on the last one. I’ll do my best to keep it up!

    Second, if you missed it, there’s a third set of writing tips up now. Let me know what you think. Helpful? Not helpful? Happy to hear.

    But for this blog, I thought I’d take a momentary diversion that will lead back to writing. 

    I write this on Sunday afternoon, 5 April 2009. In three weeks, all things being well, I’ll be running the London Marathon. This morning, I did the last of my long, long training runs. 20 miles, before lunch. I’ll start tapering my training soon and then just hope for good health and a favourable race day.

    I bring this up not to somehow shame whatever you did on your Sunday morning (you lazy thing), but to raise an important point for a writer. Which is: Do you have anything else important to just you in your life besides your writing?

    I’m not talking the obvious important things like family or children, I mean something for you in particular. A…

    Read the rest of this post Comments (2)