So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking […]
1) A Hundredth Name, Chris Green (Abyss and Apex; Subscription Required to Access Archives) Click the link, you know you want too. No? Okay, let me convince you then. You should go read Chris Green’s story at Abyss and Apex because the man is freakin’ talented and understands things like brevity and leaving empty spaces for […]
Yesterday I shaved off the scraggly neck-beard I’ve been sporting since Conjecture, cracked my knuckles, and proceeded to write like a furious writerly-thing until I hit the 30k mark on the Black Candy draft. Then I discovered – joy of joys – that I’d written myself up to the point where the narrative reconnected with […]
Went away after the last post, wrote 898 words, then realised I was done. The net for Draft One is 20,799 word, and there is a part of me that’s still kind of shocked that I’ve written something that long. I don’t do long that often, and I can still remember two years ago when […]
Nancy Kress on writing a paragraph, which proves a nice glimpse of work-process-in-action.
Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 6315 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period:1,673 Deadline: April 30th Last night made for an awesome burst of writing – finished chapter three, worked out some more things that were bugging me about the first two chapters*, and promptly took the daylight hours of Sunday off […]
There has been actual progress on the Claw draft over the last twenty-four hours, alongside more mundane acts of not-sucking such as finishing short stories (two!) and doing the washing up. Hell, I even walked over to the local Indian take-away to pick up dinner in the interests of getting some exercise. Claw Draft Projected […]
I’m spending a lot of time with old stories this week, and I’ve noticed that towards the end of last year I’d broken out this alarming tendency towards using framing stories. I’m not sure why I did that – as a general rule I’m not a fan – but I think I’d talked myself into […]
The good thing about trying to hit a deadline and being behind: you start to figure out ways to fix stories and ideas that are broken, potentially unsaleable and not on deadline. Yesterday I took an hour away from the books to write up a plan of what I could do to transform all my second-person-present-tense-vaguely-cyberpunk […]
The difference between a good days work and a bad days work can depend entirely on how close you are to meeting a deadline. Or, in other words, 1500 words of thesis draftage today. A month ago this would have been cause for celebration; today it is met with the soul-crushing knowledge that I haven’t […]
So Chris Lynch has posted a more-or-less up-to-date bibliography of things achieved by our Clarion South class since the 2007 workshop. He’s put this together, along with some thoughts, because the two of us are scheduled to go have a chat with the current crop of Clarion South participants about what it’s like to finish the […]
The problem with writing a thesis is that it’s just no fun to talk about. The novella, on the other hand, creates the kinds of problems that I find interesting . And thus there is nattering on about it on the blog. The nifty thing about getting back to this story is that I’ve had the […]
