My name is Ali and I’ve been blogging for ten years.
Continue reading “How to Blog”
Wednesday will shortly be interview / guest post day again, but in the meantime here are some links of interest. They are predominantly writing related but everyone in the world should watch the video at the bottom.
Advice
I interviewed novelist and comedian ALKennedy for IdeasTap (which is a useful resource with lots of features and funding opportunities).
Continue reading “5 Useful Links for Writers”
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The thing about writing a book every month for a year is, it’s not very focused.
I mean, obviously you have to focus on getting words out there. But because you’ve got this thirty-day window to get the story down NOW NOW NOW, you spend the whole time splurging out bits and pieces of ideas at a rate of knots without ever getting the time to really flesh them out properly. Everything exists in potentia and parts that aren’t working yet can be left for much later, after further thought and research will surely have occurred.
All of this is really exhilarating – but then you get to the end of the project and realize now you have to go back and start addressing some of those flaws. Continue reading “How to Focus on One Thing”
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And lo, it was February, and the never-ending task of editing the 12 books I wrote across the 12 months of 2011 began in earnest.
To be honest, I wasn’t really sure where to start with this. Some people might choose the beginning, but frankly I didn’t wanna. I could lie and tell you this is because I’ve read so many articles saying starting at the beginning is narrative suicide, but (as I mentioned at the beginning of this sentence) that would be a lie.
It’s actually something of a practical issue. I’ve lost around an hour a day to the 28 Drawings Later challenge this month, so in editorial terms I wanted something I could go back to and just edit. However, the first book I wrote last year, Caligula’s Blog, deserves a lot more research than I managed to do at the time, which means I can’t just jump straight back in. Well maybe I could, but as discussed, I don’t want to. I want to be able to take a few hours at a time to get really immersed in the history of it so that I go back with as accurate a timeline as possible and much more in-depth knowledge of the period.
So, the beginning turns out not to be a great place for me to start. However, help is at hand in the form of a couple of competitions – The Dundee International Book Prize, which I mentioned in a post last month, and The Kelpies Prize.
Continue reading “Editing, and a request for readers…”
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In November 2010 I completed National Novel Writing Month, a challenge where you have to write 50,000 words of a novel before midnight on November 30th. From this adventure, an idea was born.
The received wisdom is that once the first draft of a novel is written, you’re supposed to leave it alone for at least three months before returning to edit – preferably longer. Coming back to it with fresh eyes means you’re more likely to be ruthless about cutting stuff that doesn’t work. But what do you do in the meantime? For me, the answer was write more. Essentially, NaNoWriMo created a monster.
In 2011, I set out to write the first draft of a novel every month of the year. I gave each month a genre, and off I went. It was hard going, and I only reached the hallowed 50, 000 words twice throughout the year. But I don’t regard that as total failure, more as a lesson in what is physically possible.
Whenever I was tempted to beat myself up about it, I went back to the fact I was working four days a week as an office temp throughout the year, as well as producing monthly columns for The Broughton Spurtle and Ten Tracks, and other articles for Mslexia Magazine, IdeasTap, The Guardian and STV as I went along. I may not have produced 50k fiction every month, but I think I probably did reach 50k across all my writing. I blogged about this in June to serve as a constant reminder.
But what was the final word count? Drumroll, please….
Continue reading “12 Books in 12 Months: A Review”
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Now that I’ve written the bare bones of twelve books, every publisher and their granny have announced their intention to accept manuscript submissions from un-agented newbies. Well, maybe not all of them. But a few.
Continue reading “Opportunities for Writers”
12 Books in 12 Months 