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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…
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The Clovenhoof Bible
At this point in time, Heide and I are knee-deep in planning individual chapters of the Clovenhoof novel (have I mentioned we still need a cool title?). We’re perhaps even only days away from writing some actual prose. However, the more detailed our planning and plotting has become, the more we need to co-ordinate our…
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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…
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A work in progress
I had never realised that drawing pretty lines on a roll of wallpaper could be such a useful plotting tool. With the wallpaper activity, Heide and I were able to visualise and share our vision of Satan’s ups and downs in his story. I, because I’m a geek, went home and turned it into a…
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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…
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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…
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The Adventures of Mr Clovenhoof
After the Birmingham Writer’s Group meeting last night, we sat in the pub and played the index card game again. We asked everyone around the table to write a chapter heading from our novel beginning with the words, “Mr Clovenhoof…” Once again, the results were brilliant. Heide and I gathered them together and tried to…
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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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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…