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 […]
Erasure and eraser, entrance and enter There’s a weird thing that happens to writers who rely on computer based spelling assistance. They forget how to spell things. This week, editing for three different publications, I’ve come across the weirdest word confusions. ‘She scrubbed furiously with the erasure’ for example. Microsoft Word sees nothing wrong with […]
The Panic Jar One of the things I’ve instituted for Brighton (and Hove actually) NaNoWriMo this year is the Panic Jar. At meetings, the writers put plot inspirations into the jar and when anybody gets stuck, I take one out. So far only one inspiration has been used ‘One of the characters loses something valuable. […]
Why I love NaNoWriMo We’re nearly at the middle of the month and at least half a dozen of Brighton’s novelists have cruised past the halfway point (25,000 words) and entered the home straight. Others are struggling a bit, or a lot. One has just written a norse/horse love scene Another has introduced poetic interludes […]
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 […]
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