KRIS ASHTON

Over the past eight years or so, I have revisited the short stories I wrote in the early to mid 2000s and, if I thought their core...

I’ve previously confessed that as a teenager I used to read the dictionary for pleasure; that learning new words gave me a sense of...

The past few days have been a trip back in time inside my own head. While searching the fiction submission database The Grinder (as...

Right now I’m working on a story about a teacher whose life is upended by World War Two. It was going well until I came to the part where...

Trawl through my blog posts and you’ll see I’m very much in favour of editors and the criticism they offer. Because my life is almost...

Most writing advice comes in for criticism now and again, but remarks directed at ‘write what you know’ in recent times have been...

Recently, I have been in discussions with the editor of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #63, Terry Wood, regarding my story...

Yesterday I finished rewriting a short story I first ‘completed’ more than seven years ago. The initial idea, which I won’t relate here,...

An interesting link popped up on my Facebook feed the other day. It was titled ‘10 Things to Keep In Mind When Loving a Highly Creative...

In their blackest moments, aspiring authors often cling to anecdotes about wildly successful books that were rejected ad nauseum before...

One of the guiding philosophies in my life goes like this: Don’t change something unless that change is for the better. Moving forward in...

You know that saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun”? It’s true. Painfully, heartbreakingly true. I completed my first full-length...

I am going to disagree with Stephen King. Again. A link to an interesting article popped up in my Facebook feed this week. Penned by...

I number among those generations who ‘benefited’ from the happy-clappy notion that learning grammar was old hat and writing should be all...

Because there are no hard and fast rules for using hyphens, they have subsequently been overused, underused and misused. Scratch around...

In 1979, children’s author Dr Seuss published a book called Oh Say Can You Say?. This collection of tongue-twisters is not his best known...

I’ve never subscribed to the image of the anguished author slumped at his desk with his head in his arms as he contemplates the human...

The thought is as old as reasoned thought itself: the older one becomes, the more contemplative and deliberate one becomes. It’s both a...

No matter how many academics try to dissect it, and no matter how many greedy hacks try to turn it into a commodity, the process of...

Modern wisdom has it that to be successful, an author needs to have a strong presence on social media. If you don’t have a website, a...