• The Art of Writing No. 42

    I mentioned plagiarism. There is a form of it which divides writers down the middle. It can be subtle, invasive and even contaminating. It revolves around the issue of whether a novelist should read other writers’ fiction during the process of making a novel.  There are many writing manuals which focus on a writer’s need… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 41

    In a long series of blogs about one subject, writing, there is bound to be crossover, overlapping and repetition, just the very things the blog warns you against! But, unless it becomes a blog novel, I don’t have to spend time doing excisions and elisions to give it a flow. This, of course, intimates that… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 40

    I had the problem that most writers have when they go back to draft novels they have written some time before, intending to refurbish them and flog them as ebooks. This is not to suggest that they are not good enough for publication on paper but, like hundreds of good to great pieces of fiction… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 39

    Here is the beginning of the novella, Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story, I have just published on Kindle, Amazon. I wrote about its genesis two blogs ago. I thought I’d try to explain how I set about trapping the reader (hopefully!) at its onset. It had happened with increasing regularity if you… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 38

    Repetition is the bane of the author. There is a high incidence of the repetition of a word or phrase within a single paragraph, never mind chapter! Consequently there are many writers who sit with a thesaurus by their computer or notebook. Not many of us have a labyrinthine vocabulary and having at hand a… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No.37

    Today, I have released a novella called Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Storyas an ebook on Amazon Kindle. I thought it might be worth a little detail on how it came about. I had made all the agreements with printers, typesetters and illustrator to ensure that Azimuth the paperback would come out on… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 36

    When Little Nell died she caused a national outpouring of grief in Victorian industrial Britain. Readers of the chapter by chapter novel The Old Curiosity Shopimplored Dickens to find a way out, a resurrection of the character. In its time it was the epitome of fine writing about a deeply difficult subject. But, not so… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 35

    Jacques Derrida and others of the postmodern literary circus, formulated a theory that it was impossible to produce unequivocal, unambiguous prose. Whatever you do as a writer, no matter how much of a Hemingway or Beckett you might want to be in the Spartan simplicity of your text, it will be read equivocally and ambiguously.… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 34

    Once you are writing every day and your imagination begins to bulk up on its muscle, ideas come to you many times every day regarding plot lines. I said in an earlier blog how some writers carry an ideas book in their pocket and note down the significant in what they are experiencing whether it… Know More

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  • The Art of Writing No. 33

    I was reading blogs yesterday about the art of writing for ebooks. There were many interesting asides in them, comparing ebooks to traditional paper based literature. The first one was the splendid (for the author) notion that a book is never out of print once it has been fired into the stratosphere.  It hovers forever… Know More

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