Waiting for responses to your writing is a writers lot. Pieces you send your friends. To your editor. Finally, and most heart-stoppingly, to an agent or publisher. Or out into the world as an e-book. The ritual, I would imagine, remains the same. You tell yourself it is done, that you need to stop fussing …
Author: rodericktmacdonald
Writer, pool player.
Find me at rodericktmacdonald.com
The writer and the pool player. 10 similarities.
This could have ended up as one of those Chuck Norris style lists of things that would look great on T-shirts, but there are paragraphs. I could have cornered the market in pool players who write and writers who shoot pool. My retirement plans remain on hold. And without further ado... 1) Almost anyone can …
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Critter One: Critiquing others
So I'm writing this book. And I think it is pretty good. I have written books in the past. A couple when I was in my mid teens that were energetic, in an unstructured and made up as I went along kind of way, which were fun to write until I ran out of steam …
Who are you? What do you want?
With credit to Babylon 5 and the heady days of the Shadow War when intergalactic elder races asked key characters these very same questions. (Incidentally, said war infeasibly ended just six episodes into season four after three seasons of build up. Incredibly the show just got better for it, at least through to the end …
Deadlines and Decisions
I have, in these last few months, been trying to work out a schedule for myself that allows me to work most efficiently on my book. In my fantastically procrastinatory fashion, I have spent more time wondering about how to efficiently work, than efficiently working. Stuff keeps getting in the way. Things keep happening. Highly …
The Madness of Poets. (No offence)
Funny thing happened on the way to the forum... That line used to mean something and anyone who read it would know what it meant and what it alluded to. Now some folk - no-one reading this, of course - could be forgiven for looking at this blog site and wondering where the forum tab …
July the Fourth. Who fed you… USA?
Farmers of America! I am now an American. I watch America praise so many types... The fighters, the protectors, the saviours. Minus the u of course, because I still spell savior wrong. The American farmer is far more than you know. If you are waking up into the fifth of July groaning from the beef, …
Realisations of Reality (I have seen the Mountain)
No surprise to anyone who has been there and done this, but the editing process tends to reveal more than it resolves at first. First you find superficial issues to fix, then you think of extra things that could/should be added and removed to make the story better. Then you realise how fat and lazy …
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Forward Progress, and an obsession with ‘things’.
Update Time! Yeah so I have a few projects going all at once. Because I have found over the years that trying to do just one thing and ignoring it utterly has worked so well for me, it seems I should do the other stupid thing of dissipating my energies on like 5 things at …
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Great advice and bad mantras
This week I decided to look up the websites of two current authors who write in the fantasy field and who I admire greatly. Brent Weeks, and Patrick Rothfuss. They are both magnificent writers. I have been quoted (to myself) that after reading their books I was depressed enough by their outrageous talents to give …
Roderick T. Macdonald 