-
**Competition** YOU can be a star in our novel!
We can tell from the stats that we have lots of traffic on our blog. Lurkers, who aren’t speaking up. That’s fine, we’re happy with lurkers. But we’d love to know who you are. That’s why we’re offering a unique incentive. Everyone who leaves comments on the blog will be put into a draw when…
-
Doing it in Public
How much privacy do we need or want? When we started using Dropbox our productivity soared. Instead of emailing ideas back and forth, we could easily create and share them in documents. Once we started writing in earnest, it raised a question. Writers are nosey people, it’s a given. To be a creator…
-
Research: It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.
I’m writing the “dating” chapter. All of our characters are embroiled in the world of finding a partner. Iain wrote the synopsis for this, and as soon as I saw what he had in mind I couldn’t wait to start. The opening scene made me hoot with laughter when I realised what I had to…
-
Being Flexible
We’ve learned an interesting lesson in the last week. We came away from our last planning session with a firm idea of what we would do next. We’d plotted how things would go for Clovenhoof during each month of our timeline. We’d decided on a theme for each of these chapters, so we each took half of them. We would…
-
Planning in more detail
Sharpies at the ready In order to do some more detailed planning, we met up to have a chat in a pub. Most of the discussion so far has been by email, or in the company of the rest of Birmingham Writers Group. We met in a Wetherspoons , one of the cheerful chain of…
-
Theme tunes for our characters
Another way that we can make sure that the characters inside our heads are as similar as possible is to give them a soundtrack. The 1990’s TV show Ally McBeal exploited this, and I have borrowed from that the idea that the characters will have different theme tunes for different moods. Writers using music to…
-
Collaboration Tools
The internet is a wonderful thing. It makes collaboration possible in a way that we really couldn’t have imagined a few short years ago. Emailing documents backwards and forwards is bound to end in tears, so we’ve taken a look at the software that might help. Google Docs I had high hopes that this would be…
-
The Adventures of Mr Clovenhoof Part 2
As well as the neat categories mentioned below, we had plenty of other ideas from the members of Birmingham Writers Group. Index cards, and if you look carefully you can see yesterday’s credit card bill – for £666 Self contained chapter headings Here are the entries that are irresistible as chapter headings by themselves. If…
-
Archangels
Inspired by Iain’s question below, I’ve become more and more intrigued by Archangel Michael. Archangel Gabriel is the one I grew up with. He’d be there every year in the nativity. If you said St Michael to me, I’d automatically think of M+S. It’s only latterly that I’ve come to realise some of the fascinating detail…
-
Hell’s Vision & Mission statement
Every organisation worth its salt has a vision and a mission statement. The vision is how they’d like to see themselves, and the mission statement should say, at the highest level how they plan to get there. Here’s a couple of possibilities for Hell: VISION To be the provider of choice for corrective torment. To…