I’m very good at waiting, until a deadline goes past. Personally, I’m not keen on that whooshing sound (unless it’s a self-set vague deadline…) Say you’ve submitted something, and they don’t get back in the time suggested? You know it’s probably something perfectly reasonable: the editor is ill, their internet is down, they got considerably [...]
Ah, a new novella in the works. More erotica. I wasn’t expecting to write it at all – it’s sci fi romance, which I’d never even considered. I mean, I love sci fi. I have a “A Space Traveller’s Handbook”*. But I’ve never got my head around combining my fledging sci fi plots** (some of [...]
Ever have one of those moments when a story just crystalises, and you have to get it on paper right that second? It’s a brilliant moment, but annoying, too. I had a brainwave in the middle of yoga, which really did no favours for the meditation at the end (a still and quiet mind? not [...]
I surprised myself by writing poetry today. I started with prose, but the cadence of the sentence distracted me for a moment. She follows with unfocused eyes the lazy paths of dragonflies; the mazy walk beneath the trees; the hazy winding bumblebees Lack of capitalisation and use of semi-colons as only punctuation deliberate. I’m being avant-garde. [...]
The firmest kind of deadline, I think, is a birthday. If you fail to provide a promised physical present – say, a bar of chocolate – by a person’s birthday, the assumption is that you forgot or didn’t care. For a non-physical presents this is even more so; bank holidays and empty bank accounts make [...]
I’ve typed up the first bit of the selkie story from my notebook. It’s about 9000 words long, and when I add the rest in I think it’ll be about 12000. Not too long for a short story, but I’ve stumbled across a perfect agent to submit it to, but she won’t take shorts. As [...]
…And wireless, too. Did I miss anything good? With regards to my notbook resolution: I’ve typed up about half of the notebook; all of the Greenhelm stuff, and half of the short stories. There’s just a few odd bits otherwise, and a chunk of The Dark which is half typed up anyway. Some of the [...]
I’ve been reading Pepys’ Diary, which I’ll write more about later (when I’ve finished it). I hadn’t quite clocked how much travel there was on the Thames and its tributries; apparently you were much safer in a boat than a coach, since it made it much harder to be mugged! So, something for fantasy and [...]
Traditions are weird, niggly things. You do them without question, but there is an unutterable logic to them. They get kidnapped and Stockholmed by other cultures (usually invading ones). They embarrass adolscents and young adults. Above everything else, they have to have that sense of history. They have to make sense. The original Wicker Man [...]
