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12 Books in 12 Months

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Where do you get your ideas?

Ideas never run out
© Adi Respati

As a fiction writer I tend to feel like this is a stupid question, whilst as a journalist it feels amateurish and slightly redundant to ask it.  Read their work and it’ll often become pretty apparent – Irvine Welsh didn’t come up with Trainspotting because he spent a lot of time hanging around Disneyland, for example.

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2

Terrible Picture Book Ideas

In the most recent edition of Writers’ Forum there was a feature which basically consisted of someone who thought it was easy to write a picture book for children being proven wrong.  I’ve yet to write a picture book (although it is on my To-Do List for the end of this year), but the piece got me thinking it might be fun to brainstorm some titles.  Yes, coming up with new book titles is my idea of fun – because what do you do that’s so much better?  Nothing, that’s what.  So.

  • The Blobfish At The Bottom Of The Pool – a small girl refuses to learn how to swim because her local pool is full of blobfish.  They could be literal blobfish, or some kind of metaphor for her insecurities.
  • The Repressed British Picture Book – this would basically consist of taking the British Problems twitter feed and adding pictures.  Possibly in the style of Edward Gorey.
  • Percy the Piglet Squid Has A Picnic – I was recently introduced to the WTF, Evolution? Tumblr and was really taken with the piglet squid.  I imagine his picnic would involve lots of other weird but cheery looking sea creatures and they would have a jolly time.  The blobfish probably wouldn’t get invited though.
  • Who Puked In My Boots? – a sequel to the much loved Story of the Little Mole Who Knew it was None of His Business.  It does exactly what it says on the tin.

Leave a comment if you’ve got any ideas to add…

4

Weekly Photo Challenge: Lost in the Details

This week’s photo prompt is ‘lost in the details’, so here’s a close up of some details in one of my notebooks.  I have been working on this story since last summer and tweaked the first few chapters (including the paragraphs in the photo) approximately a bajillion times – because I get lost in the details every time I re-read it.  That’s right, this picture is some sort of amazing two for one – aren’t you pleased you came?  Course you are.  Now go look at the other entries.

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8

How to Moderate Spam

CommentsBefore yesterday I had neglected the blog for quite a while, which meant a wealth of interesting spam comments awaited moderation when I signed in to upload a picture for Silent Sunday.  I thought I would respond to a selection, thus:

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8

On Terry Deary’s Sentimental Gush

ghostbusters_library1Yesterday there was an article about Horrible Histories author Terry Deary on the Guardian books page, in which he was quoted as saying that libraries are effectively past it. I disagree with that view, and wanted to address some of his points. You can read the article here if you haven’t seen it yet. His original comments are in the Sunderland Echo.

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6

Novel In A Weekend

iWrite (© jeffrey james pacres http://www.flickr.com/photos/jjpacres)
© jeffrey james pacres http://www.flickr.com/photos/jjpacres

Not the weekend just past, or the weekend before that, but the weekend before that, I wrote another novel.

Well, that’s not strictly true – it was more of a novella, whose final word count was just over 24k.  But that’s not bad going for less than 30 hours of work.

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5

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