The Green Room is a twice-monthly Zoom session with me and a bunch of wonderful writers where you can ask me questions about the craft of writing, your WIP, or the business of publishing. Step backstage and let’s figure out practical solutions to your writing problems!
It’s all run through my Ko-Fi page and costs just £20 a month.
Tonight is the first Green Room session for writers and it’s not too late to get involved.
I’ve already had great questions on editing a first draft, finding agents, writing for TV, collating research, writing series summaries and more! Even if you don’t have a question, do please come along as something might occur to you in the moment and those can be the best questions of all.
All you need to do is pop over here and become a Green Room member for £20 a month.
Twice a month, I’ll be running a 30-minute live session on Zoom where you can ask me questions about the craft of writing, your WIP, or the business of publishing. The sessions will be fun and informal and chatty. You can send me questions in advance. They’ll be recorded live and saved on Kofi for exclusive access to Green Room supporters.
There’s no long term commitment. With Kofi, you can support for just a month, or for as long as you like. Pop in, pop out: whatever works for you. My goal is to be able to give supporters advice that will make a real difference to their writing and career, because the way I see it: having worked in this industry as a salesperson, bookseller and author for over 30 years, I’ve made every mistake, so you don’t have to.
Last night saw the launch of the first episode of MARK STAY’S CREATIVE DIFFERENCES: a monthly livestream where I talk to writer friends about those little things that make a big difference to their craft and careers in the hope that we can give readers some insight to the creative process, and writers and creative folk practical advice that they can actually use!
You can join me and my guests live and ask questions and get in on the conversation. Or you can listen back to the audio podcast. Here’s the first episode with my special guest SC Gowland, curator of The Law of Consequences, a brilliant fantasy short story anthology. Other topics include the big mistakes we’ve made, happy accidents and Japanese all girl punk bands. Yes, really…
Please subscribe here or on Youtube for details of the next episode, or find me on your preferred podcast provider…
Are you a writer looking for help and advice? Come and join me in the Green Room.
Here’s a clip from the first episode of the Creative Differences podcast where I explain what the Green Room is and how you can get involved…
Twice a month, I’ll be running a 30-minute live session on Zoom where you can ask me questions about the craft of writing, your WIP, or the business of publishing. The sessions will be fun and informal and chatty. You can send me questions in advance. They’ll be recorded live and saved on Kofi for exclusive access to Green Room supporters.
I’m running this via Kofi, where you can join by clicking on the Green Room membership tier for £20 a month…
There’s no long term commitment. With Kofi, you can support for just a month, or for as long as you like. Pop in, pop out: whatever works for you. My goal is to be able to give supporters advice that will make a real difference to their writing and career, because the way I see it: having worked in this industry as a salesperson, bookseller and author for over 30 years, I’ve made every mistake, so you don’t have to.
This week’s guest on the podcast was so easy to chat with for many reasons. We both write about the same time period in Britain (the Second World War), we’re both writing a series with recurring characters, and we’re both mildly obsessed with magazines. AJ’s was inspired by one, and I’ve got every issue of Empire because I’m a sad sod.
But I also really clicked with AJ when she was talking about the three things a writer needs. The spoiler’s in the title: Passion, patience and persistence. That last one is particularly necessary. Boy oh boy is it. There are so many times when I’ve come close to just giving up, Quite recently, actually. But I was chatting with an author friend who was feeling the same way and we soon realised that this is all we’re any bloody good at, so we’re going to stick with it. Things have got better since. A bit. There are glimmers of hope on the horizon! Hang in there, people. This too shall pass and all that…
Oh, and in the extended version for our subscribers we discuss writing emotional scenes, what happens at the London Book Fair, ageism in publishing, how to organise your book series bible (and I show you what the Witches of Woodville series bible looks like!). To support the podcast and get hundreds of hours of extra stuff pop along to Patreon here, or join the Bestseller Academy here.
Towards the end of my interview with Freya Berry, author of The Dictator’s Wife and The Birdcage Library, I do my usual thing of asking what’s coming next. Her reply was to say that while developing ideas for her third book it occurred to that it might be the most challenging one of all. An author’s first book is about simply seeing if you can get to the end, which is a huge achievement. The second book is to prove that the first one wasn’t a fluke, and so with the third book she is “trying to be ambitious” as she develops her ideas. And she’s right to think that. It’s hard enough to get one book published, but few authors get beyond three books, particularly in when working in traditional publishing, and those that sustain a career do so by continuing to surprise and delight their readers. Yes, there are authors who have great careers by seemingly writing the same book over and over (naming no names, but there are some very formulaic books out there), but as AI threatens the livelihoods of writers everywhere, I think that style of cookie cutter fiction won’t be enough to appeal to readers. A writers’ voice needs to develop and grow over time and a reader will join them on that journey. In the podcast I give the example of Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld books started as brilliant and funny parodies of the fantasy genre, but as the series continued his themes and characters deepened and became their own thing the parody elements fell by the wayside. His voice is what we kept coming back for and AI might try to parody that, but it will never truly have a voice of its down.
Mark Stay Writes 