Living In Writer’s Time
Just like deadlines some special occasions sneak up on you. It’s Gamesday in a couple of weeks and Blood of Aenarion is going to be released there and yet somehow, while wittering on about writing and Macharius and short stories, I have forgotten to talk about it. You’re probably wondering how that is possible. I mean it is a major hardback release with the most astonishingly beautiful cover and it features some of my favourite characters ever. It’s also my first new book for Black Library in what– 8 years? (Bloody hell!) How did this escape my notice? The secret, Read more…
Revising Macharius
This is the part I always enjoy. The grunt work of writing the first draft is out of the way and I am now going through The Angel of Fire in Scrivener with an eye to improving it. I took a short break away from the book last week so I could come to it cold for the rewrite. In an ideal world this interval would be longer than a week, but even that small amount of time has given me some distance. Since it’s been several months since I wrote the earliest parts of the book, I have plenty of Read more…
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…
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…
What to Do When You Don’t Feel Like Writing
Yesterday, I felt really slow of mind. I was tired after being woken in the middle of the night by an incredible thunderstorm. The day was very hot and sticky and I really wanted to be outside. My RSI was playing up. There were men working with loud power tools in my building. I did not feel inspired in the slightest. I did not want to write. I found myself planning a blog post about it then I thought this is stupid and I went and did some writing. What is my secret technique for doing this? I opened up my Read more…
^