Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This blog brought to you by Florence and the Machine’s High as Hope album. And some of Ceremonials. What The Water Gave Me is fantastic. Two big thoughts this week. (Not legitimately big, just the two discrete subjects I want to briefly discuss. Discreetly.) 1) The internet can …
Continue reading Restraint and Discernment : A Writer’s Thoughts for the Week
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! 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 did say I’d see you next week, but I didn’t say which day! I continue to be distracted by life. House selling is very consuming: you move out of your own home in advance, denude it of character so visitors can impress their personalities upon it, see …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Strange time to disengage, the week after releasing your book, but that’s what I did. Missed a blog, and a bit more. I’ve been busy. Living life. Losing sleep. Working, and working when not working. There was some all-consuming play in there too. New Orleans is very diverting. …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I continue preparations for publication of The Gardener and The Goddess. Release date remains Monday March 31st 2025. I was just working to get the book set up for pre-order, and ended up fixing a sentence. Okay, two sentences. Such changes mean a new updated format file for …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! As regular readers may know, I have begun to learn more about some formal aspects of storytelling. I’m doing this to sharpen my understanding of what I do and why in writing novels, and to improve my presentation on the page. A bit late after completing 3 books …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! First off: happy Hogmanay! Best wishes to you all in 2025. I wrote a long blog about conflict and co-operation as a follow up to my discussion of complexity and coherence, and rather disappeared up my own fundament in the process, lots of dubious anthropology and theories …
Continue reading The Writing Life: The Treasure in Trash, a Convert’s Tale.
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This is my third stab at this blog. I’ve missed weekly deadlines as a result. Originality warning! There isn’t any here, but I wanted to say it anyway. The world is a complex place. We are complex creatures. But we delight in reducing the complex to the simple, …
Roderick T. Macdonald 