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My grandmother moved with her kids to Mexico for part of their highschool years. She brought Mexican cookery back with her to 1950s America, which resulted in recipes like this one, because even just across the border, in Houston, she wasn’t able to get the ingredients she needed to make real Mexican food. So she […]
Peaches: your characters are high on dangerous substances like sex & adrenaline. Peaches: every scene you write is angry.
I’m going off-script now. I’m going to need you. Now we get up to our elbows in blood and bone, together. In a few days, I’m going to start a series of professionally relevant, deeply difficult edits. Publishing, so I gather, is a business that keeps its cards close to its chest; I don’t want […]
This is the second and final post that will cover flavours of editing that I inflict on my own manuscripts but that I don’t see referenced anywhere else. My previous post dealt with how our perceptions of words will change dependent on what physical medium they’re presented on; in that post I suggest an editing step that […]
Medium is not a petty concept to writers. Words are autonomous from the paper they haunt, but our experience of the words — a collection of phenomena that make up a work of writing — isn’t. We have a tendency to interpret stimuli differently in different contexts. In book design, a good font has financial […]
I really can’t tell you how much I love this soup. I took the basic recipe from Delia Smith and modified it until I was happy. I never buy tomato soup anymore, because this recipe is better than anything I could buy in the store, and better than any tomato soups I’ve had in restaurants, […]
I turned towards the phone and wagged my left hand up and down from the elbow, palm up. I was frustrated. “They sell millions of copies. Who edits these things? What’s the copyeditor doing, picking his nose?” “It doesn’t matter,” said my mum. “The plot sells the book.” “I know. I know.” “You can produce all the flawlessly […]
When I was young, I had a psychotic break. I don’t remember exactly how long it lasted — it was quite a while before things settled to the point where I could reasonably claim that my experiences were within normal psychological limits. To put it plainly, I went utterly insane for a period of several […]
My novel begins, invariably, with an image I’m compelled to describe. I take great care with imagery; I like to look at something much more closely than most writers, so I must be certain the image can be fully grasped in few words — otherwise I’ll make it ridiculous, if not pompous. I’ll spend hours […]
This series takes an unpopular approach to editing fiction. It’s been said by smart, successful people in the industry that the biggest difference between an unpublished author and a published one is a finished manuscript — so amateur authors had best not spend their time worrying about perfecting their first drafts, and just get it […]
not very alice 
April 7, 2012
by Alice M.
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