Category Archives: On Writing: The Novel
The Wild Drive-by: Elspeth Cooper
Songs of the Earth is the first book of the Wild Hunt series and is also Elspeth Cooper‘s debut novel. T’is being compared with The Name of Wind and that cannot be a bad thing. US rights have been
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The Shallows Drive-by: Favel Parrett
Favel Parrett, quite apart from possessing an awesome writerly name, is also an awesome writer. And a lovely person. Favel was a participant in one of the first QWC-Hachette Manuscript Development Programs in 2008 and the very
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The Two Pearls Drive-by: Alison Goodman
Voted by her peers as girl most likely to be the first female doctor – or a meerkat impersonator – Alison Goodman is also, as luck would have it, an extraordinarily talented writer. She taught me one of
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The Generation Loss Drive-by: Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand has been responsible for some of the most amazing works of literary fantasy in recent years: Generation Loss, Illyria, Mortal Love, Bibliomancy, and Black Light are but a few of her novels. Her short stories are
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The HebrewPunk Drive-by: Lavie Tidhar
Lavie’s Tidhar’s first novel The Bookman was released in 2010 by Angry Robot (back when it was a HarperCollins baby), the next one Camera Obscura will see the light of day in April 2011 (as part
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The Baggage Drive-by: Gillian Polack
Gillian Polack is an Australian hsitorian and writer of fantasy. She is the author of the novel Life Through Cellophane, edited Masques (CSFG) and the new anthology for Eneit Press, Baggage, which contains stories from such luminaries as Kaaron Warren and Deborah Biancotti. She has written fantastic entries for one
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Maths Not Being My Strong Point …
… I can generally spell, but numbers are not my friends – I find them sneaky and dishonest and unreliable. I don’t care if the Fibonacci Numbers have a cool name. I am, for all intents and purposes, innumerate.
However, I’ve been pulling the various bits of the novel together – in manner of Frankenstein’s monster – since I drew up the
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Writing Week – The Autopsy
So, here I sit back at work after a week away, doing nothing but writing.
Okay, I lie.
I didn’t just write. I threw temper tantrums. I ate astonishing amounts of choclit and consumed such vast quantities of sugar that for brief periods (before the inevitable sugar crash) I
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Friday = Writingday (TM)
Some people call it ‘procrastination’ … I like to think of it as ‘contemplation’ .
So, as I sit here in my pyjamas (the ones with the feet in them), eating my yoghurt and kiwi fruit, slurping down the vanilla coffee, I am staring out the window of the study here at the ramshackle cottage. I am staring straight at the
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On writing a synopsis
Synopsis (noun) = a summary or outline; a brief general survey (Thank you, Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary).
And so the synopsis makes me cranky. What to leave in? What to leave out? What’s essential? What if you hand it over to the Important Readerish People and you realise you’ve forgotten to include that pivotal scene with the pink elephant?
So, as I try
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