This month we have expert advice from Heather Cooke on repetition and its effect on your writing. Our forums provide the success stories, and what a nice crop they are too. Ten Top Tips covers making your website work for you and Useful Websites is all about research with three great sites to visit.

• Editor's News
• Successes
• Expert Advice
• Top Tips
• Useful Sites
• Inspiration

Hello Dear Readers,

Welcome to Spring! It’s certainly sprung here, with bees buzzing about and spring flowers blooming. It’s great to feel the warmth of the sun on my skin and I even walked home without my coat the other day!

It’s a busy month in the UK. We’ve already had Mother’s Day and there’s Easter and a Royal Wedding – which has a welcome extra day off attached to it, thank you Wills and Kate – to come.

And talking of Royal Weddings, why not enter the competition we are holding in honour of the impending Royal nuptials. You can win yourself a copy of our The Art of Writing Poetry course for composing an appropriately themed sonnet. It’s free to enter and the closing date is April 30th. Find more details on our Royal Wedding Competition page.

So, on to business! This month’s Expert Advice comes from Heather Cooke. She’s addressing the issue of repetition – when you should use it for effect and when it’s needless. Ten Top Tips advises on how you can make your website work for you and thanks to our forum posters who have again come up trumps with success stories to encourage others to keep trying. Useful Websites has three great sites to use for research for children’s writing and poetry.

Calling all Sci-fi lovers – this month is the 10th Annual Sci-fi London Festival. So if you can get to London this really is the place for you. It runs from April 23rd to May 2nd at the Apollo, Piccadilly Circus. I am a huge Sci-fi fan so would love to attend this festival. It has an Easter parade, a genre film school you can attend, a Pub Quiz and there’s the Arthur C Clarke Award for Literature to be presented. Plus, numerous short and feature length films on offer, from classic-style Sci-fi epics set in outer-space to dark psychological trips into the minds of men. Sounds just great! Individual event times and prices can be found on the SCI-FI London 10 website.

Happy writing!

Shelley

P.S Don’t forget our Short Story Writing Competition is accepting entries and they are coming in thick and fast so get yours in if you want to be in with a chance of winning!