Relaunching My Fictional Life Blog
After four years of hand-coding this blog I have finally had a chance to install WordPress and start migrating across. This is going to make my life a lot easier and hopefully will mean I can blog a bit more often than I have been doing. I will be able to jump on and write […]
Reality Nibbles
It’s amazing how a little dose of reality can put a fictional life on hold. At the start of the year we had the pleasure of house guests (my in-laws, with whom I get on very well) staying with us for two months. In February we haunted the various rooms of our house trying to […]
The Dark Knight
I finally watched The Dark Knight on DVD over the weekend, and it was actually not as bad as I expected. In fact, once the movie switched from the Joker as the villain to the far more interesting Two-Face, it became thoroughly enjoyable. But then Two-Face has always been a more rounded villain, even in […]
Noted
So, after about a week’s work and 6000 words, I’ve completed the synopsis (4000 words) and character notes (2000) for this new story. Now I’m satisfied that I can leave it to mature and allow other stories to fill my mind and be written, and when I come back to this story I will have […]
Wired
What do news stories of horrific instances of child abuse in Austria and other European countries have in common with the birth in captivity of a pygmy hippo? Somehow the combination has sparked the idea for a new teen novel that my muse has kept me awake over for the past two nights. I spent […]
Lessons in Showing
I’ve been stuck on editing an important scene on the first page of my completed children’s book, and eventually I decided to get some opinions from other writers (thanks Wendy, Lauri, and Sher). Showing a scene allows the reader to own it, and therefore makes it more powerful and memorable. So it stands to reason […]
Genreflecting
As mentioned previously, I’ve been deliberating my genre choices and doing some research. It seems I can rest easily for the moment, and that my decision to put Breaking Point aside for a while is quite a good one. I should be able to use it to re-enter the market if and when my books […]
Buffet in the Dark
One of the major issues affecting my writing progress is the “stab in the dark” approach I’ve been taking over the past 13 years. I started off with two drafts of a silly mystery novel that I made a lot of mistakes on and eventually filed in my round file as my “training novel”. I […]
Think Sideways Week 1
It’s no secret that I keep stalling on my fiction every time I have a major non-fiction project in the works. I can’t seem to concentrate on reality and unreality, and put in the work on both, at the same time. The first quarter of this year I was commissioned to create 40 brain teaser […]
Grow Up
A friend or relative of an author, entrusted with a draft copy of her manuscript, somehow released said manuscript onto the Internet – whether intentionally or unintentionally, is unclear. Now, while having an unedited draft distributed publicly without your knowledge and permission is devastating, The author’s reaction to this situation is downright childish. Instead of […]