Anorexic or Bulemic? I’ve just had an email from an American writer, who is thinking of entitling one of her workshops ‘Your writing style – Anorexic or Bulemic?’ By this she means that writing can be either anorexic – slimmed down to such tight proportions that it is all bone and no flesh, or bulemic […]
Blog failure Yes, I failed to blog yesterday. To be honest I was having a bit of a word glut. I’ve been reading my NaNo groups responses to this week’s challenge (include a scene featuring marshmallows in your novel!), a copyediting job came up and I’ve been learning a new stylesheet of over eighty pages […]
It couldn’t happen to a nicer writer … Roy Kesey’s debut short story collection, All Over, will be published by Dzanc Books in October 2007. Roy is a darling, who gave me and Fion Gunn dinner and moral support during our sometimes difficult residency in Beijing. His writing is described as ‘beautiful and powerful … […]
The value of writerly critique Is undeniable. As long as you are willing to listen to what your fellow writers tell you, and to learn from it, you will write better fiction, certainly in the early years of your writing life, and probably always. There is a tiny little caveat though, that emerged over the […]
National Novel Writing Month – update 25 writers turned up on Wednesday for the Brighton (and Hove actually) kick-off, that’s 10 up on our biggest meeting of the previous year. People loved it! We pulled three, then four, tables together, played NaNo Bingo, filled up our Panic Jar, and generally talked up a storm. We […]
DeathGrip: Exit Laughing Cover art by Billy Tackett Stories that cross genre-lines, astonish, titillate, and elicit a guilty snicker. If you’ve ever giggled at a funeral, laughed aloud during a solemn prayer service, or cracked up at any madly inappropriate moment, Exit Laughing is the anthology for you! Bizarrely side-splitting tales by some of today’s […]
How removing one punctuation element improved my writing I just cut this sentence from a short story I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks, ‘They all had their tics and devices to get through; their amulets and fetishes and good luck charms, rituals and neuroses and superstitious behaviours.’It’s not a bad sentence in […]
Request slot Mark Hubbard (who has one of the most interesting jobs ever [to me at least] – see details at Mark’s website) and I have been bemoaning the fate of the writer who doesn’t live in the USA, and Mark suggested this particular experience deserved a wider audience. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that magazines, […]
MCNA WRITER’S BURSARY CANCELLED From the Medical Case Notes Association website: ‘We regret to announce that we cannot proceed any further with the MCNA Writer’s Bursary. We apologise if you have recently seen our Writer’s Bursary advertised in either the Writing Magazine, a newspaper or on the internet. Following increasing difficulty with administering the bursary, […]
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