Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Yuletide is here again. Well, technically it has just passed, as the days are once again growing longer. The festive season is festooned with distractions. Work parties, family gatherings, buying gifts. Wrapping gifts, which, when it comes down to it, do I actually enjoy? I enjoy finishing the …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Do you, like me, sometimes wonder where the wonder went? Did it disappear in a puff of wonderment? When I decide to watch a random streaming flick, I often look for a ‘space’ movie. Something set out there, big enough to give that sense of wonder you would …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Pusillanimous. A long time ago a girl asked me what word she was thinking. I said pusillanimous, thinking it a fancy word she’d be deeply unlikely to be thinking (and which I didn’t understand the meaning of, I just liked the way it sounded, an upmarket purple of …
Continue reading Hyperfactual transmission: A new origin for an old phrase
Hello my friends and the occasional relative! I come to you somewhat shame-facedly, on account of my total failure to engage in the real work facing me: rewriting the opening of the novel. I have nibbled at, then chewed on the bones of all the other available listed problems, and any that remain can all …
Hello My friends and the occasional relative! On a wall, in a bathroom, lived a laminate. Beneath that laminate the chipboard swelled, and grew warped with time, but for years I beheld the message that laminate traced for me, and like it or not, some of the phrases never left me, or versions of them …
Time Passes. Hello, friends and the occasional relative! I visited my home town of Edinburgh recently, and while much had stayed the same, a lot had changed. Profound, I know. So I’m going to talk about chip shops. First, I am convinced that if you want the real experience of fried fish in Scotland, don’t …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Edinburgh Chip shops and fantasy city design, a diversion
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This is my sixth attempt at writing this column. I'm not saying this is the best, it's just the one I'm willing to share right now. Once I was a boy with shining dreams. Fantasy fiction, of my own making and the stories I enjoyed reading, were an …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: Managing the Disconnect.
I walked in the rain this evening. It reminded me of Scotland: a bracing cold, but invigorating, my memory choosing to omit the reality of Scottish rain, pissing relentlessly down, soaking you through when walks in the rain weren’t for pleasure, but a miserable necessity. I grew up in the rain. I wonder now why …
I'm not publishing the blog I wrote earlier today. Didn't quite capture what I wanted to say. So instead I'm freehanding this one, not even a spellchecker to save me! I started writing fantasy, as I've said elsewhere, to create worlds of my own to escape into, after enjoyng the sensation of entering into other …
I’ve been meaning to write about the struggles of managing work and writing for a long time. I’ve written, or tried to write in a lot of different circumstances, and it is hard to say which, if any, has been the best option. Obsessive teen living on a farm with not much else to do? …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Work and Writing Part 1: The Overview
Roderick T. Macdonald 