Delightful Deletions
I broke something on my website. I really liked the way My Fictional Life worked on WordPress and love this theme by Sayontan Sinha. So I was attempting to merge My Fictional Life with the rest of HearWriteNow and do a slow migration of the whole site onto WordPress, but too much code got stuck […]
More Book Buying Options for Australians
Following on from my post about The Book Depository, I’ve found two options based in Australia that offer free shipping within Aus. These are Emporium Books* and Borders. I haven’t tried either, so I can’t comment further than that, but they might be worth a comparison if you’re on the hunt for a particular title. […]
Novel Revision
I’m now doing a Novel Revision course in parallel to the Writing Career Course. While the Writing Career course is helping in places, the novel I need to fix is completed so this makes much more sense. The other novel (now that I have been able to see how to convert this into the first […]
Book Depository
I’ve discovered an excellent alternative to Amazon.com for those of us who live outside the US and have to cop the massive shipping charges and lengthy waits for our purchases (at time of writing: $5 per shipment plus $5 per item from Amazon, and $12.50 per item for Marketplace purchases; up to 3 months delay […]
Literary Fiction versus Popular Fiction
My dear friend Lauri over at Thoughts From Botswana wrote an interesting post on Literary Fiction versus Popular Fiction. These are my thoughts in response: For me plot is art. Characterisation and character relationships are art. There is a real art to constructing a work of fiction that both shows and tells a compelling story […]
Villainitis
I struggle to maintain my villains at a “pure evil” level. I’ve started a couple of books intending to introduce a gleefully wicked antagonist only to find myself understanding my character’s motives. It’s only a short step from there to discovering that your villain actually cares about something or someone, that he has a soft […]
Rights and Conspiracies
In post-birth bliss my plans were simple: spend as much time as I can handle at my baby’s eye level trying to see the world from his perspective; take it easy, live simply, let the housework go for a while; and gradually, as the mood takes me, get back into the writing I really love […]
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 […]