It’s Autumn in Oxford, leaves tumble from trees, the night air chills, and University staff prepare their annual ritual of running around while shrieking ‘The new students all look twelve years old.’ I can’t let this month go without a newsletter so I wanted to mention my time at WorldCon in Dublin where I spoke…
Resistance isn’t futile: it’s a darned good read.
‘If they wanted to stay at the top of the pile they had to preserve the pile!’ I’ve just finished Jay Aspen’s novel ‘Resistance’. What if growing your own food brought harsh punishment; what if a bloated bureaucracy used hunger to keep hold of power? A lesser author might have handed us a society to…
Write and edit and edit and…
My word count ticked upwards each day, at least five hundred and often more. Sometimes I wrote a thousand a day, once I reached two thousand, and I developed bruises from patting myself on the back. However, quantity doesn’t guarantee quality: words may be a mirage. Often you’ll try to capture a concept but your first…
Over to you…
Can I ask your good selves to take a little action? Nothing too painful. I’ve worked with the people at MailChimp to set up a mailing list system. I’ve tested it from the quiet grasslands of my home and it all appears to work, but I want to test more rigorously. Try the following steps…
Coming later this year…
Wonderful things aren’t they; the end of the month. If you’ve set yourself a goal of squirting out a blog post once a month they can motivate you into writing, and if you’re reading this it means I actually finished the writing. People often get paid at the month’s end, which is nice.
Review: Jericho Writers
No matter how long the path… Writing is a journey; you’re constantly learning the writing craft and also uncovering details about yourself. Some ways of travel are faster than others; sitting alone and thrashing out pages of verbiage may teach determination, but feedback from others can help you learn faster as can studying creative writing…
Kevinism? Elliottism? Seriously I don’t know.
Striving for increased pretension isn’t recommended, but here I am, desperately seeking to bolster my opinions by naming them. Are my ideas so weak they need inflating with an ‘ism’? Or have I developed a new way of thinking, or at least a tidy way to sweep together existing chunks of thought? You decide. Mentioning…
450 words on 5 Editors Tackling 12 Fatal Flaws
Hello everyone – apologies for the long absence. I could dish out an excuse revolving around my novel re-writing, but a new book review will dish out more fun. Sorting alphabetically is popular these days: our technology enjoys arranging everything, and computers often see numbers as coming before letters. If you put the title “5…
Abraham Lincoln and the Forth Bridge
Writing is a journey: a constant striving for new skills, a struggle to learn and implement new ways of communicating. Abraham Lincoln once said that if he was given six hours to chop down a tree he’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe – he knew the value of preparation.
Spit and polish (not my favourite flavour)
I’ve recently upgraded this blog to WordPress.org from WordPress.org. I have more control over the site design now, and am working out which widgets I can add. The design shouldn’t change too much, but you may experience my tinkering over the next few weeks. Aren’t you lucky. The novel hasn’t gone away. I recently had…