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End of Year Round-up
Statistics Blog entries made 42 Total words written for manuscript 28973 Pubs used for planning 3 Tellings-off from old ladies 1 Church services disrupted 1 Copies of Birmingham A-Z defaced 1 Bored children made to endure planning sessions 2 Index cards used for fun planning games numerous Thoughts on the process so far Heide…
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Old Harry’s Game – Christmas Special
It’s festive and satanic and funny. And available until 30th December. Merry Christmas from Idle Hands. (only available in the UK. Sorry)
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The Devil and the W.I.
What links the devil with the Women’s Institute? Or, more precisely, who? Go on. I’ll give you ten seconds to work it out. I got thinking about this person whilst doing a spot of research for a chapter of our Clovenhoof novel which features a children’s choir (and animal slaughter, fake blood and credit card…
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Creativity in the Christmas Carnage.
Elf sorts his baubles At this time of year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with a million things other than writing. If you get a break from over-eating, over-drinking and over-preparing for Christmas then how do you make the best of that time for creativity? I have some thoughts on this. It’s my belief that…
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Tell me what you think. Be honest. I can take it.
Consider… Scenario A: My wife comes into the house, fresh from the hairdressers and says, “What do you think?” Scenario B: My wife shows me a hairstyle in a magazine that she is thinking of getting herself and says, “What do you think?” Or perhaps consider… Scenario A: My six-year-old daughter brings me a page…
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When real people turn fictional
Inspiration comes from all manner of sources. This is an almost verbatim transcript of an e-mail conversation Heide and I have been having over the past week or so. Heide: I realised last night that for a couple of weeks or maybe more I have unconsciously been picturing Simon from BWG [Birmingham Writers’ Group] when…
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**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…
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The Story of Job
I am currently plotting chapter 4 of our novel for Heide to write. This chapter has the working title of “Clovenhoof Needs People” and deals with Clovenhoof’s (aka Satan’s) being subjected to the most misery-inducing illness known to science: man-flu. It occurred to me whilst beginning to plot this, that I could make some analogies…
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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…
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From Ideas to Planning to Prose
We’ve been blogging at Idle Hands for exactly one month, one week and one day, charting our attempts to write a collaborative comic fantasy novel about Satan’s days in retirements on earth. We’re now in the process of writing some actual prose. This comes as a bit of a surprise to me because I usually…