Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! A quick one this week, on a thorny subject. What, my friends, is style? Do cats have it with abundance? In writing style seems to be both sought after, and discounted, if you listen to the wild warblings available on the once world wide web. It is both …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have had a good week. I hope you have had one too. Now, on the eve of returning to work, I wish I had more time off. Isn’t that always the way? Too much time spent looking at the screen upon which I now type. But, I …
Continue reading Imagined History, Anticipated Rewrites, and Optimism
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’ve been doing some thinking recently. (Don’t we all? Don’t we all engage in thinking constantly? What does that phrase really mean, when you think about it?) I’ll start again. I have been engaging in a form of creative introspection recently. Life has been throwing distractions and stresses …
Continue reading What to write next? Time to trust the artistic gut
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I had a daydream about a spacefaring story, complete with prolonged dialogue exchange and random bad technological ideas. It was terrible, but fun to go with for a while, comparing Tom Waits' and Nicholas Cage’s Renfields (there was a reason to do with insects and vegetarianism – I …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Last week I talked about trying to remove yourself, or at least your ego, from your writing, to embrace the other, to try to express viewpoints alien from your own. This week, I will entertain a rather different idea. That you cannot escape yourself: that everywhere you go, …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have a formatted version of my book. I have to do the page by page review for widows and orphans (if you know, you unfortunately know), and last bits of tidying up, hopefully without getting sucked into perfectionism minutiae. I was looking through the text and suddenly …
Continue reading Progress, Perfectionism as a failed landmine, and Amped up Porridge
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have advanced along the road to publication. I’m getting my formatting down, maybe by the end of my next weekend off. I’m asking questions and getting useful answers, playing with rudimentary tools. I’m not trying to reinvent the formatting wheel here folks, something serviceable and stable will …
Continue reading Time Travel, Prep Work, and not Fighting my Brain
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I am loath to admit it, but my publication process has stalled. I had a formatter, but they appear to have gone incommunicado. I hope they are okay, but I need to move on. To that end, I have decided to dip my toe in the waters of …
Hello, my friends and occasional relative! I have re-engaged with self-directed learning this week, and have been watching and taking notes from the highly helpful Ellen Brock. I think I first bookmarked a video of hers ten years ago, and only now do I sit down to actually pay close attention! My intention is to …
Continue reading Methodological Madness and Intuitively Plotting your way out of Pantsing!
Roderick T. Macdonald 