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Nine ways to trick yourself into writing
After last week’s moan about writing anxiety, I spent the days since tricking myself back into writing. Has it worked?
Well, I’ve got myself 4,000 words for the trouble. Below, I’ve listed what I think I did better. It’s not a methodology. It’s not life-coaching for writers. But it’s something.
Use Microsoft Notepad, not Microsoft Word
Notepad looks [...]
Posted in Writing 25 Comments
Half a thought on new writing
I am pregnant with a story.
It’s overdue, but I can’t get myself into labour. It won’t crown. It’s kicking my belly but it doesn’t want to play. It’s a distraction; I feel it most of the time. It’ll be the third time. The first time it was diarrhea. The second was a textbook delivery — [...]
Posted in Writing 19 Comments
Getting unpublished
Let’s get dramatic. In July, my book was unpublished.
It fell from the pre-order listings of a dozen online book shops, was deleted from Nielsen Bookscan. The galley proofs were unbound, de-covered and bleached back to white.
Reps got in their cars after really successful meetings with booksellers — who liked and loved and wanted to see [...]
Science fiction, technology and Twitter
If science fiction’s not dead, it’s not quite the same now we’ve bombed the moon. After all, we’ve done space travel and beaten communism. We got to the stars, and went past plopping pulp heroes on Mars when we crashed robots into it. We worried about plugging ourselves into each other before the internet; feared [...]
Balls to Kindle: I have a bookshelf
Torn from its spine and squashed flat for scrollbars to browse, a book in an e-reader is the same as another, clinging to its title on a unit that’s basically a homologous hive-pile of words. And I don't want one.
Selfish reasons for not reading Eoin Colfer’s ‘And Another Thing’
Unlike the time I used a deckchair as a toilet, fully clothed, in front of my then-girlfriend’s parents, I don’t remember where I was when somebody gave me a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy. But I remember reading it.
The thing with Douglas Adams’ writing is that you laugh the first time round, and spend [...]
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Blogging’s always dead
A wise man said ‘never let a crap blog bleed out’, but after four years-plus on Blogger, I did, and there was that.
So now, I’ve moved, full-term and fully-dilated, to a self-hosted, baffling internet called Wordpress.
I brought some old posts with me. Just a few. The rest’s been archived and deleted, so it can’t trouble [...]
Posted in Writing 4 Comments
On true crime & crime fiction
My uncle’s over at the moment. He’s a strange man at worst and a hero at best, but basically he’s dying and everybody’s minded to ignore it.
Anyway, he’s full of trivia and smokes a lot of pot, and since the two are mutually exclusive I get told a lot about the world and all the [...]
New job
I started a new job on Monday. It’s teaching me about brevity.
You’re a writer and nobody really cares*