A Writer in Residence ... Inside Your Computer

Novels, even short stories, eat ideas like forest fires eat trees. If you’re setting out on an epic novel with just one idea, you’re probably going to peter out. What I do is take an idea that interests me, that I can feel an emotional response to, and then chuck it into my head to stew for a day or a week or a year, and then see if another idea sticks to it.

Author Patrick Ness will be offering regular advice to the wannabe-publisheds [via] in his new role as writer-in-residence for the UK organisation Booktrust. (This could be the first time that the such a residence has an online address rather than a location in the location in the physical world - and that's great because we can all get to share!).

Ness is the winner of both the Booktrust Teenage Prize and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize with The Knife of Never Letting Go, described as a very contemporary coming-of-age story.

Literary London

Don't know about you, but when I travel I love to fit my reading to the place I'm visiting.

If you're off to London any time soon (one or two of you are there already!), you might enjoy this guide to the city in books, produced by Booktrust for the Get London Reading campaign. (The full, interactive map features 400 books set in, or about the capital, and if you find that any books have been forgotten - you can just add them!)

Of course Dickens and Conan Doyle are necessary choices, but there are plenty of suggestions for contemporary fiction including Sarah Waters The Night Watch, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani.

Wake Up, Fellas!

Henry Sutton, chair of judges for the fiction section of the New Writing Ventures awards and literary editor of the Daily Mirror has issued a wake-up call to male writers in the UK after all six awards went to women.

Michelle Pauli in the Guardian reports that Sutton was:

"surprised and saddened" when he realised that no men had made the grade to even reach the shortlist for the category.

The awards were launched two years ago by Booktrust and the New Writing Partnership, and are intended to nurture new writing talent.

The fiction award was won by Azmar Dar for the first chapter of a novel called The Secret Arts.