People often ask me, ‘hey Ali! Whaddya do when you’re not writing books, blogging about writing books or blogging about books written by other people?’
Good News, Everyone
Least convincing Conan ever.
My first contribution to The Working Barbarian is now live! You have just under a week to read it and vote on what happens next.
To explain – I recently became involved with an online Choose Your Own Adventure story. Every week someone writes a section, You The Public vote on what happens next, and the baton is passed on to the next writer who writes their bit of the tale based on the results.
How to write a fight scene
One of the most difficult things I’ve had to write recently was a guest post for the Fight! Fight! Fight! blog – a website dedicated to pondering what would happen if fictional characters did battle with one another. Yes, it is a niche market.
Part of my issue was that the page is run by my boyfriend, so I knew that when he gave me a deadline he actually had a few posts in hand and there was no real sense of urgency. If I missed my deadline, something else would take its place.
The other problem I had was that it was not like anything I’ve ever written before. I had a lot of false starts, because it turns out I’ve never written a proper fight scene – my stories and articles are generally pretty light hearted. I had no idea how to make it convincing, so in the end I didn’t bother.
It turns out, therefore, that I don’t actually have any helpful advice to give on the subject of writing a fight scene. Sorry for the misleading title of the post. Still, if you want an example of how not to do it, you should probably check out the site. FYI, you may benefit from familiarity with Pride and Prejudice and a thick skin in terms of creative language, as my fight is between Mr Darcy and Malcolm Tucker.
If you want to write a fight, by the way, he is always looking for contributors – you’ll find contact information on the top right of the Fight! Fight! Fight! page. Hooray for the internet!
Filed under writing
Vote Now, Or Forever Wish You Had
Jala by Eoin Hurl (http://ultimatehurl.tumblr.com/)
You may remember a post I posted at the beginning of April, explaining that one of my internet friends had concocted A Brilliant Scheme to pay homage to Choose Your Own Adventure Books via the power of the internet.
The Life And Times of A Working Barbarian is now live, with a blog and a Facebook page to prove it (social media being the only way to gain any clout these days).
Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above
My interpretation of this week’s photo prompt (from above) involved standing on the bed for an aerial view of some of my book collection – something I now regret, because it means having to put the books away again and in my enthusiasm for creating ART I forgot where I picked some of them up. Also I am staggeringly lazy about tidying.
If you’re interested, the books are (starting at the top right and going clockwise, as per Sarah Rosso’s original cheese post) : Moranthology by Caitlin Moran, The Luminous Life of Lily Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin*, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, Return of the Last Gang in Town (a biography of The Clash) by Marcus Gray, Supergods by Grant Morrison*, Dawn of the Dumb by Charlie Brooker, The Digested Read by John Crace, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers*, The Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende, The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson*, The House on Falling Star Hill by Michael Molloy*, Labyrinth by Kate Mosse*, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond by Jon Agar*, The Complete Novels of Jane Austen, In Your Dreams by Tom Holt, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon*, The Blue Book by AL Kennedy, Game of Thrones by George R R Martin, Flora Segunda by Ysabeau S. Wilce*, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Collected Folk Tales by Alan Garner*, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murukami, The Penguin Edgar Allan Poe, and The Children’s Book by AS Byatt. In the middle are Forest of the Pygmies by Isabel Allende, Postsecret by Frank Warren, and a box of Puffin postcards of children’s book covers I bought to decorate my spare room (which also occasionally masquerades as an office/home studio for the recordings of DanDanDan).
Titles with asterisks, by the way, are ones I haven’t read yet. One of the many reasons I could do with an eccentric millionaire patron is so I can take a year or two off to catch up with all the books on my to read list – these are but the tiniest fraction of the collection. I buy books like that Sex And The City woman bought shoes, if you need an outdated pop culture analogy.
Filed under reading
Book Week Scotland
Denise Mina, Mairi Hedderwick and Richard Holloway at the launch of the Treasures campaign last week, by RobMcDougall.com
Last winter the Scottish Book Trust delivered the very first Book Week Scotland, a scheme that got people to focus on books, reading and writing for a week. Naturally I am very much in favour of this sort of behaviour, and it turns out lots of other people were too because everyone had such a jolly time they have decided to do it all over again.
