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Print and Prejudice – A guest blog from Lexi Revellian
Lexi’s books, Remix and Replica We’re really thrilled to bring you a guest blogger. We’ve had many discussions with other writers about the merits of e-publishing on Amazon. I’d urge ALL of you to read what Lexi Revellian has to say. The guest blog below is a summary of her experiences, and you will find lots more detail…
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Know Your Characters – Mr & Mrs
Canada has given many great gifts to the world, lacrosse, instant mashed potato, the pacemaker, the electric wheelchair… and Mr & Mrs. Created in 1963, Mr & Mrs was a TV show in which married couples were tested on their knowledge of each other through a series of questions. The questions were put to both…
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Know Your Characters
Writers, both solo and collaborative, need to get to know their central characters well before writing a novel about them. And the first question is not ‘how well?’ because the writer needs to know the central characters very well. The first question is which characters do they need to know a lot about and which…
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Comparing our experiences of the collaborative writing process, Part 2
Here’s another of our blind question-answering blogs about the process of writing Clovenhoof. We deliberately didn’t look at each others’ answers, and I find it interesting to see how we both pictured something entirely different at the start of the process, and we both experienced some grief / depression when it was all over. What…
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Clovenhoof – book launch party info
Clovenhoof by Heide Goody and Iain Grant Have some sympathy for the devil… Charged with gross incompetence, Satan is fired from his job as Prince of Hell and exiled to that most terrible of places: English suburbia. Forced to live as human under the name of Jeremy Clovenhoof, the dark lord not only…
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Creating Characters Collaboratively
In terms of creating interesting and viable characters, the first thing collaborators need to decide is how many central characters there are in the story. There are tracts on creative writing that say that any story has only one central character. It’s an interesting notion but an unhelpful one. Your novel will most likely feature…
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Know Your World
At a recent writing convention, I saw a panel entitled “Not Another F***ing Elf” in which four authors discussed the tropes of fantasy writing. There was an interesting moment in the discussion when it was suggested that many twentieth century fantasy writers copied the basic elements of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth without fully understanding them. …
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Building Worlds and Making Rules
What is world building? Any act of creative writing is an act of world building. The moment we begin to tell a story, we are inviting our audience into a world that is not theirs. It may have enormous similarities to that of the audience but it is not theirs. Even when I meet…
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Pigeon Park Press to publish ‘Clovenhoof’
We are very pleased to announce we will be publishing Heide and Iain’s Satan-in-suburbia comic fantasy, Clovenhoof, in September 2012. We will be posting details and images as they become available. We will be launching their first collaborative novel at this year’s Birmingham Artfest. Heide and Iain will (hopefully) be doing some workshops and readings at the…
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Writing methods compared and contrasted
Are our writing methods like chalk and cheese? Iain and I decided to compare our writing methods, so we devised a list of questions, and then each answered them WITHOUT peeking, just for once. The results are interesting. When we looked through our answers we realised that we could not have written Clovenhoof sitting side by…