Thought I’d get in early this month with my entry for Glempy’s Pictonaut Challenge, and remind you there are ten whole days to come up with a 1000-ish word story based on this lovely picture. I wrote mine across two, so I don’t want to hear any excuses!
Continue reading “The Writing on the Wall”
I am in the process of setting up a series of guest posts from smaller or independent publishers. This one comes from Eilidh Smith of Sandstone Press.
Definitions are a tricky thing. Sometimes it is easier to say what a thing is not, rather than what it is, but I will do my best to give a picture (maybe a “sketch” would be better) of who Sandstone Press are and what we do.
Sandstone Press is an independent publishing house based in the Highlands of Scotland. Often folk use the word “small” when talking or writing about us, as if size matters, but we’re not small in outlook or ambition or in the scope of what we like to publish, so I’m not sure what that “small” means. Hopefully beautiful. Maybe special.
If I can even hazard to try and define what we do, in short, we publish bold books. Not one of the books on our shelves is just a read, they all have much more to them than that.
Continue reading “Finding the Right Words”
When I asked the internet for suggestions of good songs to listen to when penning horror stories, I was vaguely thinking in terms of stuff that is creepy, atmospheric or at least lyrically dark. The responses I got, however, were altogether more diverse.
Below, in no particular order, is a selection of my top ten. Naturally these will be on repeat for inspiration for the rest of the month and none were chosen just because they’re quite fun.* There are a few bands that aren’t in there who maybe should be (Ladytron, Sisters of Mercy, The Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Alice Cooper…) but frankly we haven’t got all day, and this post will take long enough to load as it it.
Enjoy.
Continue reading “Ten Halloween Tunes”
As you may already know, for this November’s National Novel Writing Month I will mostly be writing a work of literary fiction.
I was originally going to do a graphic novel, but if I stick with that there’s no point signing up because I won’t reach NaNoWriMo’s 50,000 word target even if I take the whole month off work and do nothing but write and draw. And given that NaNo is one of the main reasons 12 books in 12 months happened, it seems churlish to ignore it this time round.
So I’ve switched, and now the graphic novel is going to happen in December and will probably be a three panel strip about Santa or something. Well, actually it’s more likely to involve a series of cartoons about me trying to write 12 books in 12 months… But I digress.
A couple of folk have asked me, “hey Ali, what do you mean by literary fiction? Surely the word ‘literary’ derives from the Latin ‘litterārius’ simply meaning ‘of or used in writing’? Are not all your books then literary fiction, as they are written down?”
Continue reading “What Is Literary Fiction, Anyway?”
I’m still working on short stories based on your comments, so don’t think I’ve forgotten you if you’ve suggested something and it hasn’t turned up! I might schedule them as posts crossing into November, because having made the decision to NaNoWriMo this year I won’t have as much time to dedicate to the blog.
In the meantime, today I’m posting a story about the lovely weather we’re having, in Edinburgh at least. The title, ‘parapluie’ (pa-ra-ploo-ee) is the French for umbrella.
What do Jedward’s Birthday, Liam Fox, Justin Bieber, Siri, We Are the 99 Percent, the Rugby World Cup, protests in London and the Korean Grand Prix have in common?
They’re all featured as keywords in this blog post, because they are the things people seem to be talking about on Twitter today and I want to see whether mentioning them drives more traffic to this page.
I don’t have a lot to say about any of them though, sadly. So what I might do is incorporate them all into a short horror story, as this month I’ve been claiming I can write a short story every single day (turns out I can’t – it’s really quite hard).
It was John and Edward’s birthday, and they were celebrating by dancing around their kitchen to the new Justin Bieber album.
12 Books in 12 Months 