A Writer's Life
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The Joy of Self-Revision
Hellllooooooo from Lawton, Oklahoma everybody! Since nothing of much interest has happened this week, I decided not to bore anyone with an update post (though, if you’re dying of curiosity to know allll about Derrida, deconstruction and other post-structuralist literary theory—hint, you’re not, I promise you—please let me know). Instead, I’m going to write about the seemingly endless journey that is writing, and bore someone with that instead. For anyone who missed the memo, I entered the Mogford Short Story Prize back in December, and I couldn’t help myself (I never really can) from getting my hopes up about it. C’est la vie, honestly: I’m always simultaneously despairing at the…
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Creative Writing Courses
It’s Monday again! I mean, I can be happy about this because I’m currently road-tripping my way through ye olde U-S-of-A (and knowing me, probably drowning in a pile of uni work), but I hope you’re all happy about it too. Especially since you’re reading this post. Yay! Hurray! Read on, brave visitor! So then, enough joviality. To business. The other day, I was scrolling mindlessly through Facebook (as one does when one should be reading, or writing, or studying… or really anything except scrolling mindlessly through Facebook) and stumbled upon a bit of a sales pitch for a writing course. I actually really love the literary page that was…
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Challenges: Proofreading and Feedback
Huh. Well, this one is a bit of a doozy. You write, and write, and write, and you think you’re getting better. In fact, you think your latest piece—whether it’s a story, a poem, a novel, an essay—is pretty damn good. But, you’re also conscientious and maybe you’re entering a competition or putting it somewhere for the world to read, so you ask a few people to read over it for you. Oh man. Buckle in. Where to start with this one? To kick it off, I’d like to say that if you have a small group of talented, painstaking and helpful friends out there who will proofread your work…
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Organisation? A ‘Writing Projects’ List
Greetings fellow humans! So I’m a little bit excited about this one, in part because I took a photo and I used glittery golden pen to jazz up my page. I actually didn’t do a great job (the gel pen wasn’t working properly so I’m blaming my tools), but I stuck it up on my wall in front of my desk because ‘look at my artistic skills’ *cough*. And James said it was nice, so there. But anyway. This idea occurred to me while I was lying in bed in early January and realised my notebooks were jam-packed, my digital filing was all over the place, and my head was…
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The Joy of (Re)Discovery
Happy Monday world! I love writing. And I love finding my old writing again (well, love-hate, but definitely a fair splash of love in there). One of the most exciting adventures that I can go on (at least inside my own house) is rediscovering old things. That’s a pretty open-ended statement because I find it really easy to have adventures and get excited about stuff, but I’m fairly confident with rating finding old, forgotten things—depending on what the ‘old things’ are, I mean I’m not advocating for digging up any ancient graves, everyone—as an exhilarating experience. But it’s complex, too. I wandered downstairs a few months ago to put a…
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Blogger Recognition Award
Happy Monday world! I was incredibly lucky last week to be nominated by Ida Auclond for the Blogger Recognition Award. If you’ve blogged for any length of time [I seriously mean any length of time: even if you started last week and have somehow stumbled upon my blog today] then you know that blogging, like writing in general, can sometimes be a disheartening experience. There will be times when you’re not sure that you’re being seen or heard, and it might feel like you’re wasting your precious time and energy on an endeavour that no one else gives a damn about. Even if you’re writing for yourself, there is still,…
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Biting the Bullet: to Submit or not to Submit?
You know how sometimes you’re on a roll, getting stuff done, thinking that there is a high likelihood that you may in fact be superhuman… When you suddenly realise you’ve forgotten to write your Monday blog post? Yeah, that just happened to me. I’m feeling pretty chuffed with myself for getting through some time-consuming chores this morning, so I won’t be too harsh on myself; besides, here’s the post! I mentioned last week that I was in the process of working on a piece of speculative fiction, and I actually started writing this particular one as an entry into the The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition (deadline is tomorrow, so if you’ve got…
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Responding to Prompts in Writing Comps
Before we start, I hope everyone noticed that the title of this post rhymes. It wasn’t intentional (originally), but I did it, so I needed everyone to appreciate my skills. Okay, now that’s out of the way, welcome to a brand-spanking new week everyone! There’s been a lot happening in the world: to everyone who participated in the Women’s Marches all around the world (there was a march on every continent! How cool is that?), you’re awesome. Regardless of what your political leanings are, those marches that took place over the weekend are an incredible feat of solidarity, and are a sign of a societal promise to work for change which…
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Cherishing the ‘Exciting Bits’
Happy Monday! It’s a public holiday in America, which is awesome, because public holidays rock. They’re even better when your boyfriend is working with the American Army, so he got Friday off as well (except it does mean that I spend a lot of time not doing the things I maybe should be doing—like studying for tomorrow’s exam. Oops). Anyway, it means we can all actually be happy about the fact that it’s a Monday (at least, those of us in the USA). It does, however, also tend to mean that I find it hard to do anything more than sit on the couch and catch James up on Sherlock…
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Writerly Habits
Habits are a tricky business. You put a whole heap of work into creating a routine, sticking diligently to it and instilling positive practices… And then you take a couple of weeks holiday— or you get caught up with work, or university, or partying, or whatever else it is you like doing with your time—and then your lovingly-cultivated habit is dead, and you have to somehow resurrect it or build a new one. Damn. Anyway, that’s me, right about now. I feel like I was (for the most part) tracking pretty well last year with regularly blogging, working on my novel and keeping my head above water with uni and…
