Archive for novel writing
Murder your darlings! The importance of concision in writing
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Writing well? It's elementary!
I remember getting my first computer, when I was a lad, and it had 1KB of memory and no internal hard disk. A few years later, I upgraded it to a model with 512KB of memory and a 10MB hard disk. My first web site – established aeons ago – was allocated only 5MB of online space. These days you can find home computers with over 4,194,304KB of memory, you can buy hard disks equivalent to 1,048,576MB, and many companies offer “unlimited” online storage space. These days, life is easy.
Navigating through the classics in a car wash
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The Kindle: A saucy little minx of a reader
You may remember that I posted a while ago, when Paul bought me a Sony E-reader for my birthday. I loved it, and all went well as I downloaded some free classics and got stuck in to it.
And then it stopped working. I was halfway through reading ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, and had just got to the good part, when my reader refused to be read anymore.
On taking time out to read trash
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Virginia Woolf - the original chick lit writer
If anyone has been to university at some point and studied (especially English), you’ll know the saturation point that takes place when you forget to read for pleasure.
Some courses require students to read upwards of six or seven books a week, and people quickly perfect the art of skim-reading, cheating (using crib notes and Google) and bluffing the way through reams of text. At some point towards the end of the course, it’s common for people to admit that they’ve lost the love of reading which prompted them to embark on their course in the first place.
On owning an ISBN or three…
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This is not a book about Fly Fishing
Yesterday, my latest novel became available as an online download, in preparation for it coming out in paperback next year. This is an amazing feeling, because it means that I’m one step closer to holding a real book in my hands, which is the ultimate goal for any wannabe author.
The other great thing about is, which may sound stupid, is owning my very own ISBN. This will be my third, because I published ‘Gardening in The Dark’ last year, and then ‘Unspent Possibilities’, a volume of poetry.
