Yikes. I’d just got back on the blogging wagon, and then I fell off it again. I’m sorry for my extended silence. I haven’t been doing brilliantly the last few weeks — I’ve had some bad pain flare-ups, along with the migraines I’ve been suffering for the last couple of months, and am barely finding time to do anything. Where I do have any time, I’m tending to use it to work on Bard, which means I’ve been reading very…
I’ve never really been a short story writer. Even that phrasing is misleading, because it suggests I’ve dabbled in short stories, but frankly, they’ve always eluded me. Any attempts at short fiction always turned into the first chapter of a novel, or lacked anything you might call a plot, even when you squinted. I know that a lot of writers cut their teeth on short stories. Why not? They’re quicker to write than novels, with more opportunities to gain some…
How are you going to stop yourself obsessively refreshing your inbox every day after the Pitch Wars submission window closes? No, obsessing over your Instagram stats isn’t a good answer; that wouldn’t stop you. So what else are you going to do? Oh, you’re going to write something new? That sounds like a good idea. If you get picked for Pitch Wars, you’ll just be revising Butterfly of Night for the rest of the year. It might be nice to…
I’m entering Pitch Wars at the end of this month (next week, yikes), so of course I’m working on my synopsis. Trying to nail that balance of summary and style. How do I convey the emotions of the book while keeping it to one page in length? Which characters are REALLY the most important ones here? Is Comma, when used as the name of a guild of assassins, singular or plural?* *This particular grammar question is, for the record, killing…
I’m currently line-editing Butterfly of Night, a novel about a screwed-up teenage assassin and her poor life choices. In June and July, I did a major plot rewrite with some big changes, and this month I’m rewriting the whole thing again for style, continuity, and because it’s too long and I need to cut as many words as possible. (I’ve cut 2411 words so far. I’m aiming for 5k overall, but I’m not sure how I’m going to get there.)…
I intended my next blog post to be a more detailed account of my trip to Ireland, and for it to follow soon after the last one. As ever when I try and plan blog posts, that didn’t happen. The last few days have been overwhelmingly hot, and I couldn’t face being on my computer long enough to transfer all my pictures, so I decided I would blog from my phone about Pitch Wars instead, and about my writing plans…
Quite often, when I don’t blog for a while it’s because I haven’t got anything to say. On this occasion it’s the opposite — it’s been a busy couple of weeks, as people who follow me on Twitter will have noticed, and I’ve been away from my computer enough that I haven’t been able to blog. So I’m sorry about that! First of all, I entered Pitch Wars. If you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry — neither had I…