22 Thursday Sep 2022
Posted in Scribbling
Tags
brainstorming, historical novel, Not quite Draft 1, The Tom Walsingham Mysteries, writing, writing process
In the beginning it was just “when the elder G. asks him about his plans to leave, Tom demurs.”
That’s all it was. A half line in Draft 0. Thirteen words in all. I thought it would be a very tiny scene, little more than a transition, a little coda to establish that Tom wasn’t leaving after all.
Then on Saturday morning… Continue reading
08 Thursday Sep 2022
Posted in Books, Scribbling
This one is for T.
I’m always a little amused at being reminded that, in my corner of the world, measuring a written text in words, is still a somewhat alien notion. No, really. I still run into people who go round eyed and ask how on earth are they going to keep count – and are genuinely amazed to discover that any word processor will do it for them… Continue reading
12 Friday Aug 2022
Posted in Scribbling, Things
Tags
Such a lofty title, isn’t it? Very, very lofty for a post arguing that the human mind is, in several ways, an easily amused little hamster. Mine is, at least, and I’ll wager that yours is too – in several way – when it comes to motivation. Continue reading
28 Thursday Jul 2022
Posted in Scribbling, Things
I’d somehow managed to dodge it for more than two years and a half, but at last the plague caught me – or, in other word, I caught Covid at last. I suppose it was just a matter of time – and that I caught it at the theatre was just as inevitable as it was fitting.
Last Friday, more or less from one moment to the next, I found myself with a very sore throat and a temperature above 39° C. Within hours a rather fierce cough and a cold joined the company – and there I was. Continue reading
21 Thursday Jul 2022
Posted in Scribbling
Tags
copies, drafts, Microsoft Word, saving files, Scrivener, writing
What is your favourite writing software?
Mine is Scrivener, nowadays. I landed there about a decade ago, when I began to write plays for companies (as opposed to “in the vague hope that someone might one day stage them”), and quickly discovered that I wanted a software that did the right formatting for me. Continue reading
14 Thursday Jul 2022
Posted in Scribbling
Once upon a time, there was a Small Writer with a Huge Deadline.
The Huge Deadline was still rather far away – and that was perhaps the heart of the problem. Had it been looming large, roaring nearer and nearer, the Small Writer would have been writing like mad, and piling up a nice daily wordcount, and biting her nails, and drinking tea by the gallon, and generally doing what she was supposed to do… Continue reading
23 Thursday Jun 2022
Posted in Scribbling
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The world being what it is, I’ve found in a drawer 26 tiny paper disks – well, 27 if you count the debatable one… Less than an inch wide, not all of them perfect circles, each bearing a tiny – and often rather cryptic – note in orange or blue ink. Continue reading
26 Thursday May 2022
Posted in Scribbling
Tags
I don’t know about you – but with me it’s like this: the closer I get to finishing a project, the more I slow down. Continue reading
06 Friday May 2022
Posted in Things
It mostly comes in two flavours.
Flavour the first: now and then, when I hyperventilate over some (more or less) minute detail gone wrong in a play, a story, a talk, or whatnot, some sympathetic soul will try to convince me that it was a negligible hitch in the form – but the substance was there, and substance is what truly matters…
01 Friday Apr 2022
Posted in Scribbling
Midnight – and rather later, in fact, because it was half past three in the morning when I added the last word to Draft 1 of ATP, Tom Walsingham’s second foray into espionage and sleuthing. Hooray!
And then it wasn’t really the last word, of course. You all know how it is: as soon as I’d saved the thing and done a back-up, I had to open it again and add one more little paragraph, and then a little later an idea occurred to me, and I jotted it down in the notebook, and by then I was wide awake anyway, far too excited to sleep, so I could have gone another hour without great difficulty – but the fact was, Draft 1 was finished, and it was well past four, so I went to bed, and found that I could sleep after all… Continue reading
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