Make it shine: five ways to polish your middle-grade

Rewiting your first draft might seem daunting, but, says James McCreet, it’s where you have the chance to really make your writing shine So you’ve finished the first draft. The story lies ‘finished’ b

Middle-grade protagonists are usually aged between 11 and 13 years old – an age when they are testing their limits, pushing their boundaries and learning about independence. In many middle-grade novel

So if someone was to ask me what the best pitch letter I have ever read was, I wouldn’t have a clue how to answer. The internet is full of earnest advice on the do’s and don’ts of pitch letters, but t

‘Sam is asleep. I could kill him now.’ These are the opening eight words of my first novel, Eeny Meeny, published a lifetime ago in 2014, which launched fearless crime fighter, Detective Inspector Hel

Horror is a remarkably flexible genre – one that can take all sorts of forms. From the subtleties of the ghost story all the way through to the flat-out grossness of body horror, along with its mallea

T hey say everyone has a book inside them. (If you’re drawn to quests or escapades you may have a whole shelf ’s worth.) But experiencing real-life events is one thing; turning that into unputdownable