hating the night
a black warrior
snuffing out the white knight
August 12, 2009 • 6:50 am 0
Mid-week Musing
August 5, 2009 • 6:11 am 0
Mid-week Musing
July 29, 2009 • 6:28 am 0
Mid-week Musing
July 22, 2009 • 6:25 am 0
Mid-week Musing
May 28, 2009 • 8:45 pm 2
Poetry in emotion
After the debacle involving Oxford’s professor of poetry election; the unpleasant idea of competitiveness has reared its ugly head in the literary world.
At all levels it appears to me that writing is generally a very friendly community, but deep down do we all harbour dark thoughts about other peoples success?
And what would we be prepared to do to forestall it?
In an ideal world we could all have success, but it just doesn’t work like that.
I, like everyone else, am in competition for everything all the time. That’s what makes me better anyway. I have to do my best to be in with a chance of success. It stops me getting lazy and complacent.
But it’s common courtesy that I do have control over. Call it morals or doing the right thing. Call it common sense, treating others like I would like to be treated myself.
But it matters. Fair play shows a respect for your fellow artists and that’s important.
May 12, 2009 • 7:07 am 4
Writing Plans
Well once again I pen this note to you, my dear bot reader. My trusty subscriber to my witterings.
I haven’t yet embarked on a novel, or even thought about doing so.
Why?
Well I need a bit more practice really, so I thought I’d try smaller chunks of writing instead. Maybe it’s lazy, but I hate the idea of starting something that major only to find I’m scrapping the beginning before I’ve even finished the first draft. I might end up writing 50,000 words and scrapping 49,900 of them. I can’t face that just yet. I suppose I’ll have to wield the scalpel at some future point (Errgh!) but for now I’d much rather dump 500 words than hundred times that.
Yeah, it’s an excuse, I think I must be lazy.
So what am I doing?
Well, scribbling a few little poems and having a go at some flash fiction of which I submitted a few pieces in the last few days. So I’ll let you know how it goes on, but don’t hold your breath dear bot, even computers need air!
It takes me awhile to find my feet and I’m still crawling around the floor blundering into obvious objects.
But I’ll get there, eventually.
Regards,
G.
Filed under: Poetry, Short Stories, Writing
May 1, 2009 • 8:30 am 0
Practice
Practice makes perfect they always say but at the end of the day motivation is also required before you can even begin to practice. There has to be a point to practice and submitting and maybe seeing your work on the net helps to provide the motivation to practice.
So it’s good that there’s plenty of websites out there that can fulfil that need. Two that I found useful (courtesy of links found on Niks great blog) are ‘The Pygmy Giant’ and ‘Rainy City Stories’. They help give focus, for me, to the practice of writing. They both accept stories and poetry but the latter is for stories involving Manchester. The former is shorter (less than 800 words) flash fiction type stories.
The third is ‘Six Sentences’ which does exactly what it says on the tin. A story in six sentences. If that’s not providing focus I don’t know what is!
I think this is good because I can find it difficult to know where to start. Having these preset frameworks provides that starting point. I shall be having a go at submissions for these three sites in the next few weeks.
Now I just need to find the time …
Filed under: Internet, Poetry, Short Stories, Writing
April 29, 2009 • 9:14 am 2
Poetry for Computers
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