You’re hearing it here first: my novel is being published in July 2014. It’s called The Children’s Pond and is set in Turangi and the Tongariro River – hence the image of the young rainbow trout – contemporary New Zealand fiction. Very exciting. 

Something from Neil Gaiman, one of the coolest writers around …

“If you’re only going to write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you will never be a novelist – because you’re going to have to make your word count today, and those words aren’t going to wait for you, whether you’re inspired or not. So you have to write when you’re not “inspired” … And the weird thing is that six months later, or a year later, you’re going to look back and you’re not going to remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you wrote because they had to be written.”

“Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project. When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.”

– Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

A handy new URL has now been set for the Bateman New Zealand Writer’s Handbook on Facebook – www.facebook.com/writershandbook – and I’m posting interesting writing news and competitions on the page for Kiwi writerly folk who might be interested. ‘Like’ us now on Facebook!

Spanish bestselling author Carlos Ruiz Zafon, who has recently published The Prisoner of Heaven, has made an interesting comment about writing in an interview for The Listener:

“It’s hard work, writing … Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you’re constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.”

I would add that the process itself is the fascinating part of writing – seeing what pops out of the ether or from one’s muddled brain. Gems, as well as dross …