Posts Tagged ‘novel’
Tuesday, June 21st, 2016
Apologies for the stupid title. I stole it from this stupid article, so do forgive me.
1. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikabu
The first novel ever written! Universally recognised as a great masterpiece of Japanese prose narrative, The Tale of Genji is an incredible insight into the moral, social, political and sexual values [...]
Tags: books, novel, novelists, reading, reviews, short stories, stories, women, writers
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Thursday, April 7th, 2016
1: Start writing. An idea is not necessary at this stage.
2: Keep writing. Pay no attention to mundane matters such as plot, character, setting, structure, or story. Just keep writing words until you have around half a million of them.
3: Now take those half a million words and throw. them. away.
4: Stare [...]
Tags: books, novel, plotting, shitty first drafts, stupid ridiculousness, writer's block, writing, writing advice, writing is rewriting
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Sunday, January 31st, 2016
Winter is cold and depressing (my favourite). I continue to fill my empty existence with reading and writing. My field notes from January:
My Black Static story “White Rabbit” has been well received, and even garnered a very nice mention in the Guardian! It’s good to see Black Static getting some recognition in the [...]
Tags: black static, blogging, books, brilliance, novel, reviews, shitty first drafts, short stories, writers, writing
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Wednesday, October 14th, 2015
A brief update on what’s what and what’s not in my world… I finished the first draft of my novel at the end of the summer holidays, which meant I had three whole days of holiday left before starting back at work. I spent those days in a whirl of shock and delight [...]
Tags: black static, blogging, crimewave, magazines, novel, short stories, ttapress, writing
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Wednesday, November 5th, 2014
This is Laika. I’m deep in the middle of a novel about Laika, and this week is the 57th anniversary of her journey into space. So it seems wrong to let this pass without some kind of commemoration.
Laika was chosen for the Sputnik mission because she was a good dog. Of all the [...]
Tags: betrayal, dogs, laika, loyalty, novel, research
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Sunday, June 8th, 2014
I live in a city where it is considered somewhat normal (even, in some quarters, desirable) to write angry confessional poetry and ‘perform’ it to friends and strangers in pubs. The performance usually consists of attempting to impose some kind of rhythm and meaning on a formless string of half-sentences by way of reading [...]
Tags: books, brilliance, katrina leno, novel, novelists, writers, writing
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Monday, July 22nd, 2013
there must be a name for this feeling you get in the middle of a novel when actually you HATE your novel and you want to throw it out of the window and start over and your friends have to talk you down and talk you up and you read blogs that say WHATEVER YOU [...]
Tags: novel, shitty first drafts, writing, writing is rewriting
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Sunday, July 14th, 2013
It’s highly possible that by the time I get to the end of the first draft of this novel, all that I’ll have to show for it is the first draft of a novel. My home will be ripped apart by feral mice (they’ll become feral after eating the thyroid medication I’ve carelessly left lying [...]
Tags: novel, shitty first drafts, writing
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Saturday, May 11th, 2013
So the last few weeks have been crazy busy but yesterday I finally handed in three assignments, cleaned my flat (sort of), made dinner for some people, drank a lot of red wine and laughed a lot and rolled my eyes a lot at the silly things everyone was saying. And later I said goodbye [...]
Tags: blogging, dreams, novel, personal, stupid ridiculousness, writing
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Saturday, April 6th, 2013
What I learned about writing this week is that you can research and plot and plan and outline and do all the preparation in the world, but when you actually start writing – that’s when you start to work out what your story is all about.
I’ve got my novel broken down scene by scene [...]
Tags: novel, plotting, shitty first drafts, writing
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