I’ve been less productive than hoped since Christmas (work, events, general laziness to blame) but I did revisit some of the exercises I did from Wonderbook by jeff Vandermeer.  The last one was quite challenging, as it involved rewriting a scene multiple times (some of which I admit to having skipped from lack of interest).  […]

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The hardest character to find a decent picture for has been Leontine.  After hunting around for a while, I finally decided to go back to my first inspiration, which was a little girl in Fillippo Lippi’s “The Coronation of the Virgin”.  And lo and behold, Signor Lippi had a few other lovely paintings, one of […]

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Being the second in my series of inspiration pictures for the WIP. I found the first of these images on my Beautiful Bizarre Magazine instagram feed, which is a constant source of incredible art that could serve as inspiration for dozens of stories (were I the sort of person who could have that many ideas).  It’s […]

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I first heard Dessa (aka Dessa Darling, aka Margaret Wander) listening to one of Welcome to Nightvale’s live podcasts. She and Paper Tiger performed “Call off Your Ghost” and I thought, well, that’s pretty cool, I should find out more. So I did, and discovered that Dessa is a singer, composer, songwriter, rapper, and spoken word artist […]

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I finished off Nanowrimo at just over 4,000 words so it was reasonably productive.  However, I’ve now started a three-day a week work contract so the next few months may be a bit slow. One lovely way to pretend to be working is to look for visual references to help ground your words in something […]

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Well, I’m a bit behind on this, as expected. No, I did not expect to write a novel during November. However, I did use the National Novel Writing Month period to try to get as many words down as possible while I was working on Cold Hillside. I never managed more than about 10,000 – […]

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Not very original, but hey, I’ve been sick.  We spent 10 days in California and returned to fever, weird dreams about Escher bodies, architecture and Hillary Clinton. First stop: San Francisco.  We went to a distillery in a old airplane hangar, to Alcatraz, to a free museum full of arcade games, to the Japanese Tea […]

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  Or more precisely, Here’s How to Finish that Fucking Book, You Monster, courtesy of Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds blog. To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention, I find it very hard to finish books.  Hell, I find it hard to start books. And as for the stuff in the middle, […]

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I’m still working through the exercises from Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering the Craft.  I’m currently rewriting a snippet from the novel in limited third person, detached narrator, observer narrator, and involved author (omniscient) styles.  Needless to say, I’m quite adequate at limited third person – which is my primary mode of writing – and I […]

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To keep my writing muscles working while I’m suspended in “I’ve written everything that I know happens and now must actually develop a world and a plot” mode, I’m doing writing exercises. I’ve just started on the ones featured in Ursula K. LeGuin’s wonderful book Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the […]

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