I hope that I’m a good Mummy. I know I don’t spend quite enough time with my children, and that I find their games pretty boring (playing “shops” would have to be the worst, where you line up to buy the same six items over and over and over and over….) But I read to [...]
Archive for February, 2009
On parents in fiction…
Posted in The writing life on February 24, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Cambridge calls…
Posted in Foreign sales, The writing life, smugness, writing tool box on February 20, 2009 | 9 Comments »
I’ve been asked by the editors of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing to contribute a chapter about creative writing in the genres. This is a very great honour, of course, but also a real pleasure for me to note that genre fiction is at last being recognised as worthy of academic consideration (and [...]
Adventures in first person
Posted in The writing life, viewpoint in fiction, writing solutions, writing tool box on February 13, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Have you tried first, second, and third? No, not bases. Persons? I’m talking viewpoint, not teenage sex (that should get me a few extra hits this week).
After feeling despondent about my first chapter of my new book, I had a 3am epiphany about what was wrong with it. I had written it in 3rd person [...]
Year’s Best Fantasy
Posted in Foreign sales, The writing life, smugness on February 11, 2009 | 12 Comments »
In other news…
My story “The Forest”, which was published in Dreaming Again last year, has been selected for Tor Books’ Year’s Best Fantasy collection in the US. This is beautiful surprise: essentially, the short stories that go in YBF are the ones that the editor has selected as the best from all around the world [...]
Is it work, or is it play?
Posted in Deadlines, The writing life, Work/Life Balance, writing confusion, tagged writing as a hobby, writing as a job, writing life on February 7, 2009 | 3 Comments »
I can’t figure out if writing is my job or my hobby. Putting aside the money, this is one issue that continues to confound me. When I’m not writing, or it’s hard, and the deadline is approaching, and I’d really just rather be on the couch reading a novel, it feels like a job: I [...]
