1) I’m writing in third person this year. This really isn’t my preferred narrative POV, but so it goes. I shall write slowly and suck more, neither of which are fatal conditions. 2) My writing goals are as they always were: take over the goddamn world. 3) I need to remove all forms of fiction […]
So, apparently I lied yesterday – I am back today. I didn’t mean to lie, or expect to be here, but after a day at the final Year of the Novel course at the Queensland Writer’s Cetnre there was a part of brain that clicked over and said wait, yes, I am meant to be […]
So after a week of sturm-und-drang and putting forthblog posts and twitters that worry my parents, it’s time to get back to the talking cats. There seems to a process when I sit down to write novellas. It starts with this is easy, no problem, which is quickly replaced by aaargh! WTF? Who thought I […]
My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the […]
For the first time in a long while, I’ve managed to write two thousand words in the space of a day. While this is certainly good news around these parts, it comes with the somewhat sickening realisation that Giving Up Coffee is Working. Interestingly, kicking the draft version of Claw into gear has involved sketching […]
I woke up this morning with a desire to blog, only to discover that the back end of my website is down for some kind of regular maintenance, and this presents problems because I’ve grown so used to using it that the thought of posting straight to livejournal seems redundant. So instead I write this […]
We’re fighting the doldrums here in the word-mines this week, trying to bully my work ethic into something resembling its normal state after house-guests, cons and the furious rush of getting a new book into existence. Such lapses are not unexpected, but they are unacceptable, and so I’ve deployed the Spokesbear into his advisory position […]
And rejection 16 for the year arrived in my inbox this morning, which means there’s an outside chance that I may hit 20 rejections before the end of August. I like those numbers, . They mean things are starting to pick a bit on the writing front, especially since eleven of this year’s rejections have arrived […]
And so I have hit the point where I need to tackle that debacle that is my writing desk, which has been looking like this since I got back from my cat-sitting adventure: The irony of this is that I rarely spend much time writing at said desk, even when it is cleared off. I […]
Yesterday I sat down with the Spokesbear, a bunch of e-mail, my copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and a notepad to construct my to-do list for the rest of the year. It’s a habit I fell into a few years back (well, sans the Booklife part, but I suspect I’ll be rereading it often in […]
Act One: Yesterday’s Short Story Idea Peter sits at Fritz the Laptop, planning his writing time for the day. WIP: Oooo, I haz a title. Peter: Go away, I’m meant to be working on my novel right now. WIP: “The Unicorns of Suffragette Three” Peter: … Peter: No. I will not be lured. Aroynt. WIP: […]
This phrase has been running through my head for two days now, often borrowing David Bowie’s voice and intonation from a bit in Labyrinth where he says something very similar. It just sits there, repeated over and over, refusing to go away. This doesn’t become dangerous until I start listening to Suffragette City and pondering […]
