Today I observed a pattern in my writing. I have been working on a story that goes by the working title of Clocks for some months now. It is one of those stories that emerges by accumulation. Every so often I add another paragraph, or a sentence, or even just a word. It is now [...]
Sarah Crown over at The Guardian book blog today asks readers for their top books of the noughties. Unsurprisingly my picks are quite speculative in nature, and there are so many that I eventually gave up trying to list them all. It was also complicated by the fact that many of my favourite books read [...]
Neil Gaiman has just won this year’s Hugo award for best novel, for The Graveyard Book – and I can’t be the only one who isn’t surprised by the news. I knew Gaiman was more than just a great writer when I read the comic mini-series Death: The High Cost of Living in 1993. I’d [...]
The World Science Fiction convention is well underway in Montreal by now. Up until a few weeks ago I was sure I would be attending, but when it came down to it I just could not justify it for this year. I’m doubly sad as many Clarion friends are there and I would love to [...]
The leader of my tribe on the Colbert Report. I’m so happy.
I just stumbled into an excellent critique of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Sandman’, here at Grand Hotel Abyss. My soft spot for teh Sandman stories is pretty well catalogued, but I found a whole bundle of insights i this essay that I now thinking through with fascination. What makes it a superb work of literature is the [...]
Its been ages since I updated my progress working through the infinite pile of books beside my bed, so here goes a brief round-up of the last three months. Firstly, I read something like 120 short stories in various states of completition at Clarion. They were the greatest leaning resource for me as a writer [...]
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 [...]
And who are you? Yesterday the Clarion group sat in a semi-circle around Neil Gaiman and listened to him talk about story. The light was shining so brightly everone was glowing. I have photos, I may share them. Neil talked about want, specificaly what characters want and using knowledge of that to make a story [...]
Neil Gaiman arrived yesterday to take the reins as our instructor for week four of the Clarion workshop. The whole group went to see The Dark Knight and Neil came along as well. Pretty exciting. The general consensus seemed to be that without Heath Ledger it would have been a bad film. With him it [...]
