There’s a terrible meme emerging from the internet writing community. It arises from good intentions and common sense, and like most examples of common sense applied to complex situations it is utterly, utterly wrong. You can see this meme at work in the debate around publishing a book a year following Steph Swainston‘s retirement from [...]
Sarah Crown has started a fascinating discussion on the resurgence of fabulism in literary fiction over on The Guardian book blog, brought on by Tea Obreht’s surprise win in the Orange prize. I didn’t need to read the comments to know there would be at least half a dozen from irate members of fantasy fandom, [...]
Continuing the slow progress of archiving my pieces from The Guardian. It’s interesting to think that three years on from this piece, women writers now seem (to me at least) stronger than ever in all the genres of speculative fiction. I hope it’s a trend that continues. It’s also interesting for me to see how [...]
Kelly Link continues her blog tour around the paperback release of Pretty Monsters with a post about ideas, where they come from and why we have them. (Kind of.) (Kelly was our Week One instructor at Clarion ’08. She is a brilliant writer, an evil Mafia player and I can’t think of her without thinking [...]
At Clarion, Kelly Link taught us about the logic of night and dreams. Lessons learned at Clarion can take some time to sink in. This one has seemed very relevant to me this week.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about self publishing recently. I’ve been considering two projects that might be described as self publishing. And I’ve been looking at how self publishing fits into my professional life as a literature development worker. And I’ve just been following a thread incited by a Facebook status update from [...]
It being late Sunday evening, I want to throw a question out into the void and see what comes back. Geoff Ryman often rolled out the term ‘broken backed’ when he was teaching at Clarion. Geoff meant it not as a general term for a bad story, but as a specific term for a good [...]
So today I graduated Clarion. WWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!! It has been a long, hard six weeks. So long. So hard. They don’t tell you how much hard work Claron is going to be when they let you in. I heard the words ‘Bootcamp for writers’ and thought..pfaff…all day every day to just read and write stories. Eeezy [...]
Today I finished two weeks at Clarion. It feels like much longer. There is a consensus that one week of Clarion world time is about three weeks of real world time (or should that be the other way around?). One of my fellow clarionites has observed that we are living in strange environment. The weather [...]
The locals call Aberystwyth, the almost capital of Wales, simply Aber. It makes sense, its a mouthfull of constanants. Its an odd almost capital. Twelve thousands residents, seven thousands students. Some tourists and caravan parks. More than a few hippies and a sprinkling of writers, if you can seperate the two. I like it. I [...]
