So last week I started working on a story about a man with a birdcage full or sparrows instead in of a heart and the question of what happens when you swap out the sparrows for something else. It ends badly (because it’s one of my stories and they almost always end badly), and there is […]
I got the writing moving again over the weekend. Not full, productive workdays where I get my 1,000 words down, but enough to feel like I’m actually doing something. Today’s list of things to do consists of words: words; e-mail; tracking down groceries. I will achieve all of these. Everything else is superfluous. This will […]
Mornin’ peeps. The laptop’s on battery power* at the moment so I’m racing against time to get a blog-post written before the computer yawns and says “sleepy now, going away.” Yesterday I wrote 381 words on a story, poked at another to see where it fell over**, cleared out 50-odd e-mails had been waiting for […]
1000 words of redraftage on Black Candy last night. It appears that the “hours per day” writing metric I’ve been used to get the Cold Cases draft in is going to be replaced by the more familiar “wordcount needed before I can sleep” metric. I suspect my process may be seasonal – Brisbane is too damn […]
I’ve not been writing well for much of this week. This is understandable, given the circumstances (dying relatives, grieving, comforting the grieving, and going in search of an affordable jacket to wear to the funeral) but it’s also kinda frustrating given that I constantly open the Black Candy draft and think “so damn close – […]
I recommend going over to Angela Slatter’s blog and reading this entry on Write-Club. It should provide context for how I managed to achieve this in the space of two months*: The short version, for the click-link adverse, is that write-club is an agreement between two writers to sit in a lounge-room once a week […]
1) More Hornspotting today, this time courtesy of a review over at Horrorscope by Craig Bezant. 2) Apex Publishing are offering pre-orders on Descended from Darkness, the anthology that brings together a years worth of stories (including my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) from Apex Magazine. 3) Last night there was write-club, and I wrote up […]
Today is a little chaotic, so I give you the following post in four-point structure. 1) More Horn-spotting over on Jeff VanderMeer’s blog today, this time in the form of a Horn review. 2) My parents have currently made it from Turkey to Singapore, currently scheduled to land in Brisbane sometime tonight. Went over and […]
So last night, in a fit of mild insomnia, I busted out a bunch of words and managed to make Yesterday a productive day. Then I engaged in the sport that girliejones has dubbed Horn-spotting. Then my internets went wonky, so I went back to bed. Anyway, for the record: I’m tempted to try and […]
My life seems to be settling into a comfortable word-count routine again, which is good news in terms of getting the novel draft finished but somewhat crap in terms of interesting blogging. I have noticed how much easier this whole novel-writing-thing is when you actually have a midpoint to the story – perhaps the first […]
Black Candy Draft Projected Total: 80,000 Total Words to Date: 8,288 Words Done in Previous 24 48-hour Period: 2,037 Deadline: July 23rd Spent twenty-four hours wibbling over what I’d done, trying to work my way into the project. Cut what I’d done for the second chapter (not deleted, just cut away for the moment and […]
Meet the new project du jour destined to occupy my evenings: Black Candy Draft Projected Total: 80,000 Total Words to Date:9,466 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 609 Deadline: July 23rd Yep, I’m taking another stab at the problem dubbed “Peter Doesn’t Have a Finished Novel.” This became the most likely candidate because I have […]
