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Showing posts from September, 2016

All in good time

The art of plot procrastination is something you have to master when you're writing. You can't burn through your plot too quickly, so how do you overcome the desire to throw in each staggering revelation in your story just to get them onto the page? It's sometimes frustrating when it's done badly. The protagonist finally locates the one person who has the answer to all the questions, and when the critical question is asked of the character, the response is often, "I will tell you everything you need to know, all in good time, but first, you must be hungry!" This sort of thing usually ends up with the character with all the information getting murdered before he can answer said question. How did I get round it when I was writing Spireclaw? Well, without wanting to spoil the plot and revelations in that story (Spireclaw thrives on its twists and turns and blind alleys), there were a couple of techniques which I employed.  Use several angles at once. Keep seve

Sound of my summer

This is what was playing repeatedly in my ears while stretched out on a sunbed by the pool this summer. A blissful trance track to listen to while staring up at a pure blue sky through swaying palm trees. Very inspiring. Oh, and did I happen to mention that my book "Schaefers Integrity" is free on the Kindle this weekend?

The new stuff or the old stuff?

On a Nerdist podcast I was listening to recently (I can't remember who was being interviewed, it might have been the awesome Michael Ironside), Chris Hardwick asked the question, sorry to paraphrase, " Do you keep looking out for new stuff to fill your head with, our do you keep going back to the old stuff you love, to reinforce those things in your mind?" What a great question! Something I've considered several times since. When my better half asks me why I buy new music when I have so much music already (my HTC 1 M8 has a 128Gb MicroSD card full of pinned music from my Google Play repository), I struggle to answer. But I suppose the real reason is that you can only discover a piece of music for the first time once. I have favourite albums from every year and every decade. And when I bought them I would listen to them on hard rotation for as long as a month, unable to bring myself to swap out the CD and listen to anything else because it would be some kind o