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Creativity in the Christmas Carnage.
Elf sorts his baubles At this time of year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with a million things other than writing. If you get a break from over-eating, over-drinking and over-preparing for Christmas then how do you make the best of that time for creativity? I have some thoughts on this. It’s my belief that…
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Tell me what you think. Be honest. I can take it.
Consider… Scenario A: My wife comes into the house, fresh from the hairdressers and says, “What do you think?” Scenario B: My wife shows me a hairstyle in a magazine that she is thinking of getting herself and says, “What do you think?” Or perhaps consider… Scenario A: My six-year-old daughter brings me a page…
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When real people turn fictional
Inspiration comes from all manner of sources. This is an almost verbatim transcript of an e-mail conversation Heide and I have been having over the past week or so. Heide: I realised last night that for a couple of weeks or maybe more I have unconsciously been picturing Simon from BWG [Birmingham Writers’ Group] when…
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**Competition** YOU can be a star in our novel!
We can tell from the stats that we have lots of traffic on our blog. Lurkers, who aren’t speaking up. That’s fine, we’re happy with lurkers. But we’d love to know who you are. That’s why we’re offering a unique incentive. Everyone who leaves comments on the blog will be put into a draw when…
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The Story of Job
I am currently plotting chapter 4 of our novel for Heide to write. This chapter has the working title of “Clovenhoof Needs People” and deals with Clovenhoof’s (aka Satan’s) being subjected to the most misery-inducing illness known to science: man-flu. It occurred to me whilst beginning to plot this, that I could make some analogies…
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Doing it in Public
How much privacy do we need or want? When we started using Dropbox our productivity soared. Instead of emailing ideas back and forth, we could easily create and share them in documents. Once we started writing in earnest, it raised a question. Writers are nosey people, it’s a given. To be a creator…
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From Ideas to Planning to Prose
We’ve been blogging at Idle Hands for exactly one month, one week and one day, charting our attempts to write a collaborative comic fantasy novel about Satan’s days in retirements on earth. We’re now in the process of writing some actual prose. This comes as a bit of a surprise to me because I usually…
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Your Satan Song Titles Needed!
So, here’s Satan, alone in his crumby flat (literally; Satan likes biscuits and does not do hoovers). He’s at his desk, the floor around him littered with dozens of screwed up pieces of paper like a flock of crap origami sheep. His pen is poised above a fresh sheet of paper. Yes, Satan is writing…
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It’s not a Writing Group, it’s Therapy
I have a number of books on my shelf about the art of writing. Some of them are great reads, usually because they’re funny and enable me to laugh at negative writing traits I see in myself. ‘How not to write a novel’ was particularly entertaining in that regard. Some of the best aren’t intended…
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Research: It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.
I’m writing the “dating” chapter. All of our characters are embroiled in the world of finding a partner. Iain wrote the synopsis for this, and as soon as I saw what he had in mind I couldn’t wait to start. The opening scene made me hoot with laughter when I realised what I had to…