Blog
01 June 2009
It seems to me that starting a new novel is a bit like storming an unknown castle. (And, why yes, we did visit a castle this week, thus the visit by the Department of Extremely Predictable Similes).
First up, you start by circling the castle, looking at the walls, the towers, the moats, the gates, those nasty little holes in the battlements where the defenders pour out boiling oil. You look for weaknesses, places where the defences have been neglected, routes where you might break through to the heart of the castle to raise the flag of victory and execute the tyrant of, er, something (strained similes, possibly).
Occasionally, you send in a probing attack, only to have it repulsed.
So far on the new novel, I have had men repulsed by arrows, the aforementioned boiling oil, and something nasty that really can't be mentioned in polite company, or here.
I have yet to breach the defences.
Of course, if this was a perfect simile, I would have been able to just pay the same £6 admission charge to the metaphorical castle as I did to the real one last week. And there would be a nice cafe.
18 May 2009
Via Aliette, my cyborg name:
Get Your Cyborg Name
Yes, this was my first journal entry for many, many weeks. Yes, it's trivial. Yes, it'll probably be ages before I post again...
25 March 2009
For various reasons, I've been out of touch for a while on the ethernets, and I haven't been doing an awful lot of writing.
But I'm finally starting to try to get myself back into gear, and I am launching into The Big Revision of 'Secrets of the Dragon Tombs'. As always, I hope this will take only a week or two, and as usual, I shall be wrong.
However, the whole thing has been made immeasurably easier by having so many perceptive friends who have critiqued the manuscript. Thank you to all of you. I now know exactly what I have to do to beat this thing into shape.
Here I go.
22 February 2009
So, for my birthday, Steph's parents gave me a gift certificate for blurb.com. For those of you who haven't come across Blurb, it's a make-your-own-books service, like lulu, but only for books and apparently with better quality photograph printing.
I'm planning to use part of the gift to print up a photo book of photos of Mr Darcy from his first five months, and the remaining amount to print up a bound collection of all my published short stories (I think they'll all fit in one volume, although I haven't actually collated them).
The photo book I'm fine with, but I thought I'd throw out a couple of questions about the story collection:
Continue Reading "Question..."
11 February 2009
For the last few months, I've had this awesome (in my opinion) premise for a YA science fiction novel knocking around in my head, but I can't for the life of me think how the book would end.
No, I'm not going to tell you the premise, because it'll just sound stupid written down.
Continue Reading "Up next..."
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