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Approaches to Writing
I want to write a number of blog posts about how we might go about plotting this story of Satan’s life as a mere mortal. However, that requires me to explain (to myself, if no one else) what my approach to writing is. This is particularly important because it does stand in stark contrast to…
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How did Satan lose his job?
So, Satan’s lost his job, has he? Well, how would that happen? By day, I’m a secondary school teacher. Actually, by night, I’m also a secondary school teacher, merely asleep. My experiences of people losing their jobs comes from my own industry so, let’s think, if Hell was run like British state education, what events…
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Who would be Mr Clovenhoof?
So that we can both write about Satan in a consistent way, we need to agree on what exactly he looks like. We thought it might be helpful to imagine who we’d get to play him in a film of our story. The above pics, Robert de Niro, Gary Oldman, Simon Callow, Tommy Lee Jones, Mickey…
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Who is Satan?
Lucifer (Le genie du mal) There are some bad answers to this question and some terrible answers to this question. It would be hard to explain who Satan is without putting one’s personal spin on it. The only way I believe one can answer it honestly is as the question, ‘Who is Satan to…
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Nerys Thomas
Nerys has an aunt who lives in the upstairs flat from Satan. Here are some of the index cards that formed her character: Nerys has everyone’s best interests at heart. That’s what she tells herself anyway. She likes to think that she knows what people need better than they know themselves. Her best friend for…
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Ben Kitchen.
And the character sketch for Satan’s next door neighbour… Ben lives in flat 3A. He lives alone. He would like to pretend he is a self-contained individual, a lone wolf but, in truth, he is desperately friendless. Unfortunately, his overall personality is not conducive to making friends. He suffers from a form of OCD which…
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Mr Clovenhoof.
So after the index card game/brainstorming session in the pub, here is the first character sketch. Satan has lost his job and been booted out of hell. Perhaps he should have seen it coming. His last seven performance reviews all highlighted a “lackadaisical” attitude, revealing a master of Hell who has been coasting for the…
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Starting to create characters
Thinking up the characters led to one of the most riotous evening’s fun I’ve had in a long time. We’d planned to talk about this after the fortnightly meeting of Birmingham Writers Group, when several of the group routinely go to a nearby pub. We’d noticed previously that the discussions we’d been having about the…
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I could draw you a Venn diagram of our likes and dislikes
The first thing, Heide and I had to decide was what could we possibly write that would play to both our strengths. I had recently read Heide’s novel, ‘The Million Dollar Dress’ and, whilst I loved it, it was a world away from the stuff I tended to write (body horror, ghost stories and metaphysical…
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Why it started
I’d been wanting to do some collaborative writing for a while. After reading interviews with people like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and Richard Curtis and Ben Elton it sounded like so much fun. Then in early 2011 I came across Draculas, a novel written collaboratively by four authors. The e-book included the emails that…