Raymond Chandler is the author I'm obsessing most over these days, and here's just a few of the reasons why: 1 - His prose Here are examples just from the start of The Little Sister, which I am now reading. The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: 'Philip Marlowe... Investigations'. It …
If you haven't read The Silence of The Lambs you are in for a treat. I am going to assume you've seen the movie, right? Well, there's a surprising element to the book, one that I had not expected when I read it. Since reading it, something I did to study how Thomas Harris pulled …
Continue reading The Silence of the Lambs and the Surprise it Holds for Writers
I've been wondering recently about writers who are most productive. In my own quest to become as productive as possible (make writing a habit, set aside time each day, make myself accountable to someone...) I have overlooked one of the things that fucks up my productivity the most; the cost of constant context switching due …
Continue reading Should We Delete Our Social Media Accounts?
How do you describe a book like Her Body and Other Parties to people? The book is a collection of long short stories and the collection as a whole is perhaps best summed up by the two quotes Carmen Maria Machado puts at the beginning of the book. My body is a haunted house that …
I was tagged in a thing about inspiration on Twitter but instead of replying there I decide to write a blog post. Here's the original tweet: https://twitter.com/IngaMBeck/status/995990530608828417 These have recently inspired me in my writing: Book The Long Goodbye and The Silence of the Lambs. I'd read Chandler's first book, The Big Sleep, a few …
Theodore Sturgeon is not a household name by any means. But he was a fantastic writer. Here is the first paragraph of his book, More Than Human. The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were many-windowed. Here peeped a …
Continue reading The Amazing First Paragraph of MORE THAN HUMAN
Here you have the first part of the second half of my novella-in-progress. In it, we are introduced to a new character and a new place in the novella's world. You do not need to have read anything else in the as-yet unpublished novella to read this, and I would really love for you to …
Here are the first 600 words I wrote for NaNoWriMo this year. Warm out of the oven. (My brain, I mean my brain.) Are you doing Nano? Add me as a buddy, or come chat on Twitter. Chapter One Heethe sped down the street, threading the motorcycle between cars as bullets whished past him. More …
I'm doing NaNoWriMo again. This time I have a full outline ready, a system in place, buddies and plenty of coffee. I'm pretty sure that I'll manage to get the 1660 daily words done, or at least close enough to have a novel written in a month. This is the novel cover I'm using to …
Scott Hawkins, the author of the excellent The Library at Mount Char answered a question over at Goodreads about his writing schedule. Since I've been spending my weekdays getting up at 5:00 to write recently (thanks, #5amWritersclub!) I found this very interesting and motivating. It reflects well my own thoughts about writing a book as a …
Continue reading Scott Hawkins’ Unbelievable Writing Schedule for The Library at Mount Char
