Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

My latest novel, PSI Kids: Willow, is on Amazon Kindle. If you've got a Kindle, you can borrow it for free. Go get it! If you're curious, here's a link to the latest R&R press release. It will open in a one page PDF. We're making a video promo for Robyn's latest book, Maya and the Crystal Skull, at the moment. We spent yesterday filming 13 year old actor Leila Clendon against a green screen and on top of a cliff near here. Great fun - though it was scorching hot near the beach! A writer friend recommended some wonderful free writing software to me. I'm hooked. It's called Celtx and you can use it to write pretty much anything - books, movies, graphic novels, even story boards. It really is free - and I get nothing for promoting it! Go here for that. Also, many of you are still asking for another tiny wee extension to the Easy Way to Write Digital Disposa l . Go here for a (final, final, final!) chance to get the writin...

I've been studying drawing recently (I'm trying to teach myself movie storyboarding) and came across a great quote from comic artist Klaus Janson. He said, "Every creative person I know works from the ground up, from the big to the small, from the general to the specific." Many writers forget this when they're writing. They get so absorbed in details that they forget about - or can't see - the importance of the big picture. In the past I corresponded with a writer who obsessed over her opening chapter so much that she never wrote her novel. Months went by and no matter how much I encouraged her to move on, she couldn't. To her, if the first three thousand words weren't exactly right, she couldn't let herself continue with a story that she might never finish. Now, I know this is common. It's also dumb. Because writing stories is about context. The big. You cannot know what is good about a story - even down to the tiniest word or s...

There's a lot about living a writer's life that is frustrating. Endless rewrites, rejections, angst, self-loathing - but not least is the sheer amount of time people take getting back to us! Publishers are the worst, agents second with editors being marginally faster. The worst response of all - and the reason why the wait can be so hard - is no response at all. Email has made things worse. I don't know how they do it. I make a point of answering all of my emails.  But I don't understand professionals who simply choose not to respond at all. I regularly send out submissions to agents when I have a book idea. Strike rate? I'm lucky if 30% respond. The others clearly think the delete button or the waste basket are their most effective business tools. They might be right - for them. But the poor writers who are being ignored, shunned and demeaned by this response surely deserve better. Writers are made to feel sometimes that pride is optional. The crazy ...