I’ve been challenged to write an epic fantasy genre story, so I’m reading a lot of current fantasy fiction. It varies from ‘meh’ to ‘aarrrgghh!’ not only for the quality of the writing, but the vast number of fantasy genre tropes we love and hate. A trope is any type of figure of speech, theme,…
A few days on from Escape the Plot Forest Summit, I’m still digesting all that material and need to go over some of it again!
What’s been stopping you from producing that magnum opus? Taken from the opening of Jurgen Wolff’s 2007 Your Writing Coach, what follows is our take on his Seven Deadly Fears of Writing; those fears that stop would-be, and even some professional writers getting on with the job of writing.
As I have to keep telling clients, the bad old days of text-only blogs is over. Every post needs at least one image at the top so that it has some visual interest on the page and in any list of search results. You need not only to find that image, but know how and…
A couple of years ago, I calculated that I’d racked up about four and a half thousand blog posts across all my personal and professional projects. Yes, I’ve been doing this a while. I won’t say there’s a set formula (if there is, I break it regularly), but there are definitely good practices.
Sixty, seventy, eighty thousand words or more. That’s your typical novel. Somehow you have to get to there from a blank page. Unless you’re an accomplished free-writer, that’s where an outline can help.
A note for the punctuationally-challenged. There’s a brilliant article on A List Apart: The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters) by Peter K Sheerin from way back in October, 2001, now sadly marked “This article, while brilliant for its time, is now obsolete.” However the topic doesn’t go away and we’re still…
Originally posted as Surviving Actors’ Expos by Edwin Flay, February 11, 2014. “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.” – Anonymous. So, on Saturday, I attended an event called Surviving Actors, an expo stacked full of ‘opportunities’ for the aspiring/ struggling/ stalled actor…
Originally posted as Surviving Actors’ Expos by Edwin Flay, February 11, 2014. “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.” – Anonymous. So, on Saturday, I attended an event called Surviving Actors, an expo stacked full of ‘opportunities’ for the aspiring/struggling/stalled actor. I specify this type of actor, because the…
Over-sharing on Facebook: if you didn’t see the critical list of things NOT to share, check back on Part I. That was just the tip of the iceberg.
