Or in my case it will be NaShoStCoMo (short story conpletion month) as I intend to knuckle down and get the last of my short stories completed for the ebook. I’ve slacked in the last few weeks or so for various reasons but with November almost upon us I’m filled with a renewed vigour to get it done.
To date, I have completed editing the following short stories: Continue reading
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
This is a slightly different character feature for this month. Instead of doing an analysis of a character, I’m going to look at my favourite portrayals on screen of one of the most important characters in Christian lore. Continue reading
At this time of year, the web is awash with tonnes of advice on how to do NaNoWriMo properly. Most offer the same sort of stuff. Sit down and write, don’t be distracted by Eastenders or Jeremy Kyle or Judge Judy etc, stick to your target and remember that it is just for fun.
Few of them offer advice that is not trite or already blindingly obvious to the budding novelist. However, there are some useful blogs and websites out there with practical and (gasp!) original advice. Continue reading
For a number of reasons, not least of all wanting to get down to finishing my short stories for the ebook, I won’t be partaking in NaNoWriMo this year but I know some of you intend to so I’m going to do a couple of features during this, the final week of countdown toward November. First up, a detailed explanation from The Guardian on “how the 30-day method works”, an extract from a book by Karen Wiesner.
There are some interesting tips in there and I think it is entirely possible to construct the framework of a novel over the course of a 30 day period without dedicating too much time to the finer points of the novel or focussing on fleshing it out.
So the ongoing saga of my intended ebook anthology limps forward once again as I begin editing the next story. As one of the more “recent” stories (recent in that it is one of the last stories I wrote before starting university), it is one I should be relatively happy with. On the read through there were no glaring mistakes so that is a bonus straight away.
For those that may have read it before I removed it from Elfwood, let me remind you that it is a horror story of a group of hikers walking on an alien planet who discover a supercomputer. Inside there are devices inside which they can see holographic images of strange creatures. They can’t tell if they are cameras watching from afar or something else entirely… Continue reading
I have now been blogging here for two years. In this time the site has undergone a lot of changes, not least of all a change of name from procrastin8or to the current name Sweat, Tears and Digital Ink. It started off as a journal for family and friends as an update on my writing as I tried to get back into writing fiction after years of neglect. Since then I have acquired 106 subscribers – and though the hit rate has dropped off since the name change – an average of 1000 hits per month with my busiest being June 2012 when I hit over 2000 (mostly down to the single posts on the film Prometheus).
Continue reading
After a week of taking a break from practically everything writing related, I sat back down this afternoon to work on the story that had given me so much hassle. As I said in an earlier post, Dawn is the oldest short story that will go into the anthology and boy did it show.
I was deeply unhappy with this story upon a read through a couple of weeks ago. It had all of the worst rookie mistakes and in that week it had at least two edits but I was still not happy. Over the last couple of days I have mercilessly hacked out a massive 500 words cutting it from 2700 to 2200 words. Continue reading
… you know that’s all you ever were…
Sorry about the lack of updates on the short story editing front but there is one particular story that is proving a bit stubborn. I’ve read it through and given it a new edit no fewer than three times now and I’m still not completely happy with it. It will no doubt have a fourth.
For the small handful of you that might have read the original edit the story is Dawn and it is the oldest story that will appear in the ebook. It is basically about a medical procedure and it has a twist at the end (as a lot of my earlier stuff did). Continue reading
There is no better known book or series of books that get social conservatives stateside hot under the collar as the Harry Potter series.
This article, though not a comprehensive list, is fairly representative of the challenges facing Harry when not fighting dragons, undead adversaries or rescuing his schoolmates from certain death. Continue reading