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I started writing a story on the blog a few weeks ago, about strange soporific trees. It’s now plotted, and will most likely be my next attempt at a novel. It’s as-yet untitled. I’ve included the above painting in this post because she looks just like I pictured Eleanor. The first chapter appears below. Some further […]
Existing (carried over from previous post) There was a tree, in our woods, that would send you to sleep. We learnt to cultivate it – my mother’s family – to crossbreed it with oaks so the trunks grow strong and knotted. The original we cut down decades ago. A mimeograph of it hangs in the front hall; my […]
As this short story develops, I’ll post edits. I imagine this will help regular readers see how I approach editing. Drafting There ‘s was a tree, in a our woods, tht that lets that will would send you to sleep. We learnt to grow cultivate it – my mother’s family – to cor crossbreed it with oaks so the trunks grow […]
You imagine what people will say, but they always say things you never expected, because word sludge is pulled through their sillystraw brains in an entirely different set of loops than through your neural spaghetti, right? Because each person is a universe, and Cosmo can’t tell you shit about what your man thinks. I brace myself, […]
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 […]
This is Constantin Stanislavski. If you’ve ever taken an acting class, you’ve studied him. He’s best remembered for his contributions to drama theory: attempts to create training for actors that will help them portray emotion realistically. Stanislavski’s system was at first based on the principle of “Emotional Memory”, the idea that an actor must prepare […]
Stuff You Need: the chapter from your manuscript in standard English that you prepared in previous posts, a computer capable of viewing pdf files. Please note that the rules of grammar I cover here don’t necessarily apply to AAVE or other dialects of English that aren’t considered “standard”! The process is the same, though. So by now we are […]
Before you start working, go back to last week’s post and prepare your workspace in the same exact way. You’re going to have to make this a routine. Pretty pretty please? Or at least do something else to block out the world for half-an-hour. It’ll help you focus and be chilled. Good things! ~~~ In […]
September 17, 2012 by Alice M.
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