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Writing is hard! ---------

A few more from the knicht of the grene chapelle... the street lamp’s chalice holds one vermilion drop as the sunset drains alone with the stars briefly and a wheely-bin vapour clouds from the obliterated ant city the attic cassette spins dusty muffled music...

'The thing about battles is that they get boring very quickly' – Peter Jackson. I think the trick (so PJ says) is to try to keep telling the story even through the battle. The moves and so on are not important; what is important is what it says. E.g. it is not important how Boromir hacks...

Excuse me for stating the obvious but... Go to a court and sit in the gallery, preferably for an entire case (choose a simple one though!). Assume you can do that in the place where you live. I did Jury Service recently and it was fascinating; a shame I have no plans to write any legal...

In Darren Shan, his creator simply returns to dig him up himself; this adds to the drama, as Darren has to wait in the dark and trust that someone (whom he really doesn't like much) is coming for him. I've not seen Kill Bill 2, but Uma Thurman's character has to escape from a buried coffin in...

Tanith Lee is good. I remember several of hers. 'The Silver Metal Lover' I recall as being particularly moving - an android love story. I don't even think I belonged to the target readership of that, either ;-)

I don't 're-write' as such... at least, not in the old-fashioned sense. (The term was invented before word-processing, let us not forget). In other words I don't go back to page one, line one and start over. But I do revise obsessively. I'd compare it to sanding a piece of wood. The first...

Valkyrie - have you read a book called 'Earthly Powers' by Anthony Burgess? It is (apart from being a GREAT novel) just about the ultimate riposte to the religious intolerance of bi- and homosexuality. In short, it contains a rewriting of Genesis (but I won't try to describe how Burgess does it...

Funnily enough this reminds me strongly (in terms of tone and subject) of the lyrics of one of my favourite bands, Arena. Their lyricist Clive Nolan keep returning to the theme of guilt and the need for forgiveness, redemption, and atonemement (I often wonder what he's done that's made him feel...

Exactly. Over the years I've come to treat it like piano practice (drummed into me as a child; sadly I no longer play very much!). You can't expect to sit down and come out with a concert performance right away, or even in the first few years. You just play more and more until you either get...

ValkyrieRaven88: I will say two things to you about self-publishing. 1) There is actually a place you can do it more or less free of charge. Lulu is a print-on-demand service which means books are only paid for as they are printed. In theory (i.e. if you don't buy any copies yourself!) you...

Actually I did go the agent route! That was relatively straightforward - out of nine submissions I got two offers of representation, subject to certain revisions which (of course!) I made. However, the agent got no results at all for a year, at which point I sort of gave up and decided to...

:D Thanks! Riches most unlikely and fame the same (I will be keeping the day job!) but obviously I'm pretty delighted as it has been a long slog. It was roughly 13 years ago that I submitted my first attempt at a novel to a publisher; five different books and literally countless submissions...

Hi ValkyrieRaven88 - Ah yes, the shipping costs... :rolleyes: Not to use this forum to advertise or anything, but I suppose I can offer guidance if you've already decided you might buy it: you can find it on Lulu dot com by searching, where you get cheaper shipping (if you are in the...

I'll take that as the compliment you intend! I guess I just got into the habit of them, and wanted to learn more about how they are made. I'm still wondering if I 'do it right' as there are apparently very subtle rules to haiku (the general principle being 'as many restrictions as possible' it...

The concept of 'correct' or 'incorrect' is meaningless really, especially when talking about entire cultures. Agreed, massive grammatical deviation should be corrected, as should one's personal bugbear (mine at the moment is 'attendees', used to mean people attending a meeting... even though the...

Recently I've found that writing Haiku is a great way to unwind. I'm not entirely convinced you can do a proper Haiku in English, but here are some of my clumsy efforts: unexpectedly a dolphin in the shallows and no towel rows of cold gravestones jutting from unfeeling clay back...

Thanks Halo! Yes, wheedling it is! (Notice how and why she says 'mother!' later.) I don't think I ever state her age explicitly in the book... but she is 13 Any phrases in particular? Yes I do read him :-) ... though I'd forgotten he too has a heroine called Tiffany. My Tiffany's...

Virtually all books that sell by the truckload are 'overrated', no matter how good (or indeed awful) they are. Dan Brown is a bizarre phenomenon. A thriller writer who isn't even outstanding within the genre (in fact a very poor stylist and only a workmanlike storyteller) gets caught up in a...

A snippet from my new fantasy novel for kids, 'Cat Kin'. Some background to this extract: Tiffany and her parents are on their way home from visiting her younger brother Stuart, who is in hospital because of his muscular dystrophy. From chapter 2: