Introduction You know me – I’m all over the place with my interests. And yet I am not. All my interests overlap so that the sum is greater than the parts. The British Newspaper Archive is something that I have held membership of for a few years now. And I love it. I use it for a number of my interests. This article will address two of those, namely writing and
Late last year I attended a session run by my local library (Sutherland Library). Led by
For each chapter I write little notes beforehand, telling me what I am trying to achieve. Then I write to fulfil this goal. So I have a chapter. It’s intended to introduce a character named John Sutton. My note reads: Meet ex-mercenary John Sutton. He has just made camp with the rest of the expedition. There is tension between Sutton and Lord Trickett, whom he suspects is up to no
Alan Dean Foster is an author whose work I have read and owned since I was a teenager. In the mid-1970s I saved up and bought one of the books of the animated Star Trek series that Mr Foster had written. When I bought the book of Star Wars just after the film came out, ostensibly it was by George Lucas but it turns out that Mr Foster ghost wrote
It was painful, but I finally listened to advice provided by many writers upon writing – I deleted several chapters of my novel. Well, technically I just cut and paste them into another document, but it still hurt. The problem was not that the chapters were no good. I actually felt that they were fine. It’s just that they did not take my characters on the journey that I finally
I first stumbled across Dan Simmons’ writing around 1990. The book was a science fiction delight called “Hyperion”. It was a science fiction epic, a Canterbury Tales for space and time travel. Since then I have frequently indulged myself in his novels. As an author he leans towards the fantastic, whether it be in science fiction or horror.
I my last writing post, Jasne as me a whole heap of really good questions (a big thanks Jasne 🙂 ). I was going to respond to his comment and then realised that my response would make a really good (or at least average) post. So here we go. I will put Jasne’s comments in blue italics and my responses in Klingon plain text. Note that there will be some
OK – be aware that if you are likely to read my novels (when they are done) that some spoilers will be appearing in this post. But I need to think things out and maybe get feedback for you, my few but loyal blogmates. I have finally worked out a series of ideas that seem to gel as the background and overall story arc. Here they are. Background Set hundreds
If you have been with me on my blogging journey from the very beginning you will know that my focus back then was the novel that I was writing called “Tempting in Shade”. But over the past year I have written progressively less. Why is that? No, I have not abandoned this project.
Hi folks, This is just a brief catch up. Since my last post I have been getting up each morning and writing. Admittedly, first I throw a photo up on Instagram. Looking at a photo from an exciting adventure in my past tends to brighten my day. The entire beginning of the novel has been rewritten. Ten thousand new words! The secondary plot has really expanded into something that I
