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Five Years of Pigeon Park Press – What we got out of it
Anniversaries can be hazy and imprecise and I don’t just mean in that my wife and I can’t remember when we got married (we can’t; when we had to put our wedding date down on a passport application we didn’t even get the year right). I mean that anniversaries can be imprecise because it’s hard…
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Building Worlds and Making Rules
What is world building? Any act of creative writing is an act of world building. The moment we begin to tell a story, we are inviting our audience into a world that is not theirs. It may have enormous similarities to that of the audience but it is not theirs. Even when I meet…
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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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Judging a book by its cover: The title
Names are important. They shouldn’t be but they are. In their brilliant book, Freakonomics, US authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner compile top ten lists of children’s names that are most likely to indicate low income backgrounds and low academic achievement. For example, the top five boy’s names that indicate low income and…
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Research: It’s a damn odd job but someone’s got to do it.
Writing requires research. The adage ‘write what you know’ holds very true but I agree with those who say that, in this day and age when information is so easy to find, the adage ‘know what you write’ is truer. It is perfectly possible to write short stories, articles and novels without any research. The…
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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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Your Satan Song Titles Needed!
So, here’s Satan, alone in his crumby flat (literally; Satan likes biscuits and does not do hoovers). He’s at his desk, the floor around him littered with dozens of screwed up pieces of paper like a flock of crap origami sheep. His pen is poised above a fresh sheet of paper. Yes, Satan is writing…
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Goregrinder by Terminal Panda
We’re absolutely on the brink of writing some prose. In fact, I had the chance to view part of Heide’s first draft for the “Dating” chapter which made me laugh out loud in a public place (always a good sign). I, unlike Heide, am afraid to just start with a cool idea and hit 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…