Welcome to the Writing Fest 2018 - and a Terry Pratchett Giveaway!

Happy Easter, everyone, and welcome to Scookie Review’s Writing Festival 2018!

For the month of April, I’ll be posting up guest articles from writers at various stages of their careers, each of them awesome in their own right. Some posts will be from familiar faces to this blog, and others new. I'll also be adding in a couple of author interviews, chapter critiques, and a beta-reader classifieds.

To get you all in the mood, I'm kicking off with a giveaway. I'd like to give a huge thanks to Kathryn Hewitt for offering up a paperback copy of Terry Pratchett's A Slip of the Keyboard. Take a look on GoodReads.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The giveaway ends on April the 30th, and the winner will be contacted shortly after to unite the book with it's new home.

Thank you to everyone who has offered up their time, books, and writing wisdom. Without you guys, this wouldn't be possible. I'm truly excited to share the fantastic material with the wider community.

Cheers!

Comments

Your Best Character: Quiz and Contest

The best characters are put through hell and yet can still carry the story forward on their broken shoulders. Your plot will fall flat if your characters are one dimensional and strong characters can make a cliché story really shine; characterisation takes work and thought. The key to character development is to ask questions. Maybe spend time thinking about the scenarios that have happened to your character which won’t make the final cut of the novel. The questions below are designed to test that (to some degree). [NOW CLOSED, REVIEWS PENDING] Answer at least 5 of these in a comment with a link to your story and I’ll give you an in-depth review. Reviews are approximately 1000 words and take me well over an hour, so if you’re looking to polish up your manuscript then don’t miss out. Also, the opening chapter with the most interesting and well-developed character will be featured on this blog! Feel free to write about anyone as long as they feature in the same story. You can ans...

Book Review: Children of Blood and Bone

CHILDREN OF BLOOD AND BONE by Tomi Adeyemi 5 Stars Verdict: So good it hurts. The night magic died, Zélie watched her mother's murder as the Maji were slaughtered. Now Zélie has a chance to bring back magic. With the help of her brother and a rogue princess, she must outrun the crown prince and battle her self-doubts to restore magic to the world. This West-African inspired fantasy is powerful and all round awesome from start to finish. The writing is emotive and imaginative, the pacing is as perfect as it gets, and the characters are real with flaws and charm. I hardly know what to say. A brilliant book like this tells the editor in me to shut up and enjoy the ride, so I'd need to read it again to offer more of a critique. If every book was as good as this one, I would never be able to stop reading. The struggles, anger, and pain are carved into this book so deeply that the desires bleed through the pages and the triumphs feel earned. The emotion in this book is ...

Book Review: The Astonishing Colour of After

THE ASTONISHING COLOUR OF AFTER by Emily X.R. Pan 4 Stars Verdict : A synesthesiastic tale of dealing with loss. When Leigh's mother commits suicide, she visits Leigh as a bright red bird. Leigh follows her mother's memories to Taiwan to meet her grandparents for the first time and to try to understand her mother's passing. For a book so sad, it's very colourful. Leigh often shares her emotions as colours and it works very well, especially as the book travels through a whole river of emotions. It shows a battle lost, families broken, and the dark struggles of depression through the lives of Leigh and her family. To anyone affected by depression and suicide, this book contains those triggers. I felt it handled these themes with tender care and respect, without glamorising suicide or mental illness. The author also went to great lengths to portray a single instance of depression, and even clarifies at the end note that the story isn't mean to explain away d...

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