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Clovenhoof v Draculas
Heide and I have been working on our collaborative novel since last autumn and we’re mere weeks away from finishing a healthy-looking draft of the entire thing. We’ve tackled the collaborative aspect of writing in our own way, simply doing what we felt was right and it’s been interesting to see how other people have…
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28 things we’ve learned since starting this novel
It’s one of the great things about writing a novel. Your imagination leads you into strange places. And those strange places, when one’s personal knowledge fails, leads to the need for research. Heide and I, throwing plot ideas back and forth, have probably set each other some of the strangest research challenges imaginable. So, as…
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Index Card Games
I’ve used index cards (or file cards or postcards) as part of my fiction planning for at least the last ten years. They serve a number of really useful functions. Firstly, I can jot down on them ideas that I’ve no idea what to do with. I could be out and about and suddenly have…
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Chicken!
Actual chicken. Owned by Iain. I was hunting through old emails recently, looking for some detail that I knew we’d talked about, before we’d set up our Dropbox structure. Ancient History! I started to realise just how far we’d come, and how quickly. From the very first tentative shall we collaborate? email to having a…
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Digging to France
In 1990, a consortium of companies from both France and the United Kingdom completed the Channel Tunnel, a 31 mile undersea rail link between the two countries. It was a major engineering feat (regarded by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World) and despite its ultimate success…
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Gutterscum’s Performance Management Review
When Heide and I sat down some months ago to bandy ideas about for a comic novel partially set in Hell, we both latched onto the idea of Hell being run like the very worst of bureaucracies. It’s not a new idea but we liked it. We wanted it to be an awful bureaucracy not…
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Dogma – Is it a miracle?
Weird coincidence. Heide and I were at a planning meeting today (okay, we were in a pub, surrounded by people in leprechaun hats, supping Guinness at ten in morning) and we were discussing a possible plot line for our novel in which God has decided to temporarily vacate his heavenly throne. We disgressed into discussing…
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People who inspired us
We blogged previously about what made us decide to collaborate. There was a workshop at Birmingham Writers Group where we explored some collaborative writing techniques, and talked about examples of famous writers who had made it work. I had wanted to try it for years, after reading the experiences of Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman…
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Judging a book by its cover: The title (2)
Back in January, Heide and I, still in search of a title for our novel gathered all the suggested title together – the good, the bad, the mad, the inspired – and put them to our blog followers in a survey. The results are below and they present a combination of the expected and the…
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SJ Watson at Birmingham Library
Heide and I were lucky enough to meet the author SJ Watson this evening. He came to Birmingham (he’s a local lad originally) to talk about and promote his phenomenally successful novel, Before I Go To Sleep. There is something very impressive (and envy-inspiring) about the success he has had with this, his debut novel.…