Lawrence Block on the Renaissance of the Short Story
Over on his blog the great Lawrence Block is talking about short stories. He thinks that ebooks might be the salvation of the form. If you’re interested in the short story I urge you to go ahead and read what he has to say. Block is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living writers and the very definition of what it means to be a professional. What he has to say is always worth hearing. I’ll still be here when you get back. When I was starting out a quarter of a century ago, I wrote a lot of Read more…
What Do Angels Have To Weep About?
Two weeping stone angels guarded the entrance to the tomb. Their features were weathered which just made them look even more mournful. I wondered what it was angels had to weep about? Priests say it’s the sins of mortals but none of the angels I ever talked to cared much about our sins. They were more concerned with their holy war. There in one paragraph is the reason I love writing fantasy. It starts with a concrete description and progresses to a throwaway line from a bitter, disillusioned man who has lost his faith then, in the last couple of Read more…
Green, Amber, Red
On Monday I alluded to the system I use for colour coding scenes in my writing. This works really well in Scrivener because you can set the content labels in the Inspector to use different names and colours and this will be reflected in the outline or the notecards when you use them. You can achieve the same effect by changing the colour of your headers in Word or Writer (or even just putting in a note of the colour) or by writing out a list of your scenes in different coloured inks on a bit of paper. When writing Read more…
Angel of Fire Done, Back to Scrivener
I finished the rough first draft of The Angel of Fire earlier this afternoon and I transferred it to Scrivener. I wrote most of the first draft in a combination of OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word. I switched from Scrivener to these more generic word-processors on a whim. I’m still not entirely sure why. I do know why I am going back to using Scrivener for the edit though. It simply gives more control. You can make changes to a scene and revert them back at the touch of a button. You can mix and match different versions of takes on a scene Read more…
John Locke, Market Research and E-Book Pricing
I am a pretty hardcore reader. There probably has not been a week in the past 40 years when I have not bought a book. Many weeks I have bought far more. I think the most I have ever bought in one day was 45 but those were truly exceptional circumstances. At conventions I can easily buy 10-20 in a day. When I was a kid if I did not have enough pocket money to buy a book, I would spend my dinner money on them instead. When I was a student and a heavy smoker it once came down Read more…
An Easy Way To Increase Your Productivity
For the past few days I have been out in the country. Like many Czechs my in-laws have a chatu, a small place in the country, usually with minimal facilities but close to nature. On the weekends and in the long warm days of summer you leave the city, and go na chatu. Our’s is in a small village about 50 kilometres from Prague. It is surrounded by many lovely forest trails. There is no television, telephone or internet, and not much in the way of heating so we don’t go there much except in the summer. In the summer, Read more…
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