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If we’re all worms, what kind of worm are you? Do you think you’re like Richard Scarry’s delightful Lowly Worm, able to solve any situation? Or, do you have the same self-belief as Winston Churchill, who declared: “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.” Or do you see yourself as a common garden variety worm, perhaps an earthworm? Or maybe a bookworm? As much as I’d like to be a magical glow-worm, I’m probably more of a bookworm. Incidentally, glow-worms are not actually worms. My wee mind is burrowing down into wormy matters when…

Someone recently remarked that a manuscript assessment is a professional assessment and it is not the assessor’s job to elevate you. This provided grist for the mill, food for thought, and a whole bunch of other clichés and idioms. Suffice to say, I decided to contemplate what a manuscript assessment entails, what it means to be professional, and what’s wrong with encouraging writers.    According to Writers Victoria, a manuscript assessment gives “objective, professional feedback from an industry expert who is unconnected with your work.” I have a large bone to pick (the idioms and clichés are coming thick and…

“You might aspire to art but it better start as craft.“ So says Geraldine Brooks, one of my favourite authors, in a Nieman Foundation interview.  I’m sure the judges who awarded Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for her novel March, consider her an artist, as do her readers. Brooks has honed her craft to a fine art. She revises constantly.   George Saunders, who won the Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, is another author who wholeheartedly believes in the importance of revisions. In an interview with the Guardian (2017), Saunders says: “What does an artist do, mostly?…

An old timer once said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I saw this love for one’s job play out amongst presenters at two conferences I recently attended. Passion, and love for the work they were doing, seemed to provide the writers, editors, and publishers at the National Writers’ Conference with a sense of purpose. I found this passion inspiring. Whether it was editors such as Irma Gold speaking about editing, or authors such as Katherine Brabon talking about writing, it was clear they found meaning in their work.…

I’ve been mousing deep into the witching hours: brewing Ems, pixels and dark purple hexes. It took long hours of muddle and toil to cast a new gemmafranks.com site. I chose WordPress. It can’t be that hard to create your own bespoke website thought I. It’s not as if I’d have to learn how to code. Turns out, constructing a WordPress site using the default Gutenberg editor is tricky and fiddly. Maybe if I’d systematically gone through all the tutorials, I’d have found it easier. But I’m not a manual-reading kind of person. Nealey, the video tutorial guy, became a…

“I do not really think that I am frightfully important.” So wrote J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter to the poet, W.H.Auden, on 7 June 1955. This was despite the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had already been published. The Hobbit, especially, received wide critical acclaim when it was first published. I think it’s safe to say, that people who love fantasy literature feel that Tolkien was hugely important. One of my favourite family stories is that of my late father, David, reading The Lord of the Rings to his pregnant wife Ann every evening. My…

I want to be a published author. I declared that intention online by setting up this author website and changing my Instagram handle to gemmafranksauthor. As my name as a standalone Instagram handle was already taken, I debated whether to append ‘author’ or ‘writer’ to the end of my name. I am a writer and have been one for years in various capacities: as a public relations consultant and journalist. But am I in fact an author? I have written a novel, and while a few people have read it, it is not yet published. I typically associate being an…