The Long Road
To be honest, in writing The Killer and The Dead I didn’t set out to explore aspects of metafiction, which I define as fiction that interrogates itself, and that can operate in a separate space in the reader’s mind beyond merely the ingestion and understanding of the narrative: it just kind of happened. In meta …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: To Explore the Meta
Hi there folks! I did finally finish my vocalization of The Killer and The Dead today, and many improvements have been made, and a mere thirty two notes to self generated. You know, changes, continuity checks, questions for proofers and beta readers, that kind of thing. I’m still a few steps away from hitting the …
The adventure of a blank page is the infinite possibilities it represents. Each word written at first narrows the choices left for those to follow, words determining their most likely successors, options being lost due to the rules of grammar, the syntax of language. But, after a time a magical thing can happen: the groups …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: To try to Touch the Unknown.
You get yourself a little momentum going. You think "Yeah, my voice is a little scratchy because I've beeen reading my book out loud, and some tricky parts of it repeatedly, for hours." Nope, you've got that seasonal cold thingy. A brain of snot. Dawesomb. It happens. That strange lightheaded inability to focus because no …
Another rapid freehand blog today. Which means five plus edits after publication - my apologies to those of you who get version one mailed to you! My face is hot. I think because I've been talking for hours. To myself. I've been reading The Killer and The Dead aloud, and I'm here to say (thankfully …
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 …
So I finished all the primary adjustments to The Killer and The Dead today. Then I accepted all on every other change in the document made by my editor. (I have read them all in passing, but not focused on them as it is just too deep a rabbithole for me to fall down.) I'm …
Hello, and Happy New Year, folks! (I'll do a New Year's thought another day.) The copy edit of The Killer and The Dead continues in my basement of dust and glass tables. It ain’t for sissies. But the book is awesome, if I say so myself. I have continued to do 10, or 20, or …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Trust Your Editor and Yourself When Dusting Glass Tables
Today, when not drowning in work, I was thinking about analogies and metaphors and dusty tables. That is all. I also decided that I would set myself a small goal, and if I met it, I’d write a blog saying I had met a small goal. Because that is the kind of thrilling hi-jinks people …
I’ve been gone a while. In this period of absence I’d like to say I’ve been finishing off the edits to The Killer and The Dead. Nope. I’ve been working, dieting (dieting takes a whole lot of my mental energy, it turns out – I really have to focus on not eating, hahaha!), and doing …
Continue reading The Writing Life: The Dusty Road to Copy Edit Completion
