I think everyone has a small grimy goblin sitting in the back of their head saying all the things we shouldn’t dare to do. Well. At least, that’s the way it seems. Mine is particularly vocal. And I hate it with a passion that is not to be denied. Most people would say caution isContinue reading “On Daring to Write…despite all the voices in my head telling me not to…”
Tag Archives: reading
Scribbling Habits…and writerly downfalls…
Have you ever wanted to google your characters? I write a lot from research, as many other writers do. If I’m working on a story, it’s normal for me to pop over to a search engine to ask what are the names of Italian masquerade masks? Victorian era poisons? What do said poisons smell like?Continue reading “Scribbling Habits…and writerly downfalls…”
Someday-Never
Everyone has a Neverland. That’s what J.M. Barrie seems to say. He says a lot of other things that people have henpecked bloody over the years. That’s not the point. Everyone has something, somewhere, someone, they keep close when they shut their eyes. And, so it would seem, it’s only by forgetting, by refusing toContinue reading “Someday-Never”
Life off the Page: Someday-Never
So in the midst of reading Beowulf and falling in love with Anglo-Saxon poetry again, I started thinking about one particular castle I’ve wanted to visit and how awesome it would be to shout the Old English opening into the space. Ignoring, of course, that at the moment I can’t travel anywhere. But that doesn’tContinue reading “Life off the Page: Someday-Never”
Beowulf, Tolkien…and the mad scribblings of a half-exhausted writer up at an hour far too late for another cup of tea.
So now that I’ve warned you how this thing is going to go… You guessed it! I finally dug my little claws into Beowulf, the story that has been described as Master Tolkien’s lodestone, and if my opinion is worth anything, isn’t half bad of an epic, either. You’ve gotta love alliterative epic poetry. ItContinue reading “Beowulf, Tolkien…and the mad scribblings of a half-exhausted writer up at an hour far too late for another cup of tea.”
1300 Page Drafts…and other writing things
I remember mentioning somewhere on this blog that I have a monster draft encompassing 1100 pages. Well, update time. The monster is now 1301 pages long. And 100 pages of that were typed up (yes, I admit it, very late at night) in the last few weeks. Send help. I have no idea what I’mContinue reading “1300 Page Drafts…and other writing things”
Writing Update: July 24, 2020
Was up until after two in the morning writing again. Don’t try that at home. But the good news is that I’m beginning to shake off the writing fog that the last rejection seemed to put me under. I successfully redrafted a story from beginning to end before I crashed for the night. It’s aContinue reading “Writing Update: July 24, 2020”
Reading Update: July 19, 2020/ The Harry Potter Project, Continued
I imagine I’m not the only one who has finished reading a book and slammed into a very solid emotional fog, in need of some quiet in a large fluffy chair with a favorite forest green mug full of steaming raspberry tea. Alright, maybe I’m alone with the tea. But around the last four chaptersContinue reading “Reading Update: July 19, 2020/ The Harry Potter Project, Continued”
Rejection Slip
Got another one tonight. They say after a while, you get used to them. It doesn’t bother you that something you spent months writing gets a simple, unexplained “No.” Everyone gets them. Famous writers have giant stacks of them. But they are still nasty, slimy little things. I’m used to them by now. But somehow,Continue reading “Rejection Slip”
Writing Update: July 13, 2020
I kind of hate writing the last draft of a short story. By this point, I’ve gone over everything so many times I know exactly where everything falls, I’ve got a fussy little pile of characters who didn’t make the word count cut, gorgeous analogies that took up too much time and space, and atContinue reading “Writing Update: July 13, 2020”
