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 … […]
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