C.C. Hogan - Author

A short story based on a true event that happened just a few hours back. The moment of love as two complete strangers meet in the most unromantic of place - a car park lift.

I have already recorded several of my poems and put them up on YouTube, but I have now decided to record many more of them.

This is partly because I enjoy performing poems and also because I am building up to a much bigger job.

When I was about fifteen, there was a girl who lived near us, my age, who knew she was gay. This was the seventies and her parents did not understand; the church the family attended did not understand. So, she ran away.

This is what I hoped happened to her.

An angry, challenging rant to a lover who desperately needs to vent her anger.

A poem about an alternative market in London that has been running for years and is where hippies and punks and new-wave and even cowboy boot lovers all mix and are crazy together. If you are even in London, go there on a Sunday

StyleWriter 4 is an add-in for Microsoft Word that analyses your document to help improve your writing style. I am currently evaluating it and am so far finding it useful, despite the odd bug.

However, out of the box, it can be an eyeful for the author who is more interested in the sentence and less interested in a huge pile of statistics. So, here is a short guide and some thoughts aimed at book authors.

A song about simple friendship. No questions, no demands, just kind of being there when someone needs you to be - even if it is across the world.

It would seem that even when the characters in a story are safely distant in another dimension, they can still find their way into the mind and soul of the author; with or without permission. Perhaps this is the fault of the author; if you insist on creating a machine that allows your characters access to your head, maybe you should not be surprised when they use it. Isn't that right, Roslyn?

As we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death, I cannot help but think about how his writing and his approach to the human condition influenced fantasy writers around the world - including me!

The chill of an ancient world wraps around the fortress as the Mary Anne Yarde, author, lover of history, finds herself in the stark, unforgiving stones of Benwick Castle. A land of her own making, the setting of her novel, The Du Lac Chronicles, she now confronts the former King of Cerniw in a most unusual audience.

Imagine the scene: A train station in the afternoon in some forgotten town in the USA. The café is quiet, the only sounds are a gentle muttering from an elderly couple and a chink-clink as an aproned waiter polishes the ancient, stained tea cups. A woman, displaying a qualified level nervousness, stands in the doorway and bites her lip.

The Author EM Kaplan is about to meet the character from her acclaimed mysteries; Miss Josie Tucker.

Two poems about the girls at the burger van. One who makes the burgers quietly, watching the customers without judgement and the other who chatters and manages to surprise me often. Clever girl.

I have been using Grammarly for a little while now and it has been a mixed experience. Although the online editor is well reviewed and the Chrome plugin is useful, the Word Plugin has some serious issues and is probably of no use for the serious writer. I am now using StyleWriter 4 with better results.

I can't help myself; I woke up in the middle of the night and realised I had started writing the sequel, or perhaps the prequel, to Dirt.

Set seven thousand years earlier, it is a very different book...