Category Archives: writing
How to make a sandwich
Welcome to the latest in this continuing series of instructional guides to the sandwich-making art. Today's recipe, the Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Grill for Novelists, was learned during a six-month study tour of the finest sandwicheries of Paris, from a traditional French sandwichier whose great-great-grandfather claimed to have received the recipe from Victor Hugo in 1831 after a particularly messy bender during the early drafts of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
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The consultant in the fruit box
I did some quick sums a couple of days ago and realised that my final act is now seventy pages long, and I haven't even got to the really exciting bit yet.
This gave me an excuse to do something I've always enjoyed, which is editing in widescreen. Because there's a lot of material, and the changes I anticipated would most likely involve shuffling big chunks of text around, the best way to do it is to print the whole thing out, spread it out on the floor and scan it from a distance to let the large-scale structures reveal themselves.
Here then is what my living room floor looked like this morning:
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New Extract — Fitzgerald House, Part One
I've posted the first installment of a new, two-part extract from The Last Monk, which introduces the hottest young tea-cosy in modern Australian literature. As always, feel free to hand it around, comment on it or print it for use as the raw materials of a complex origami moose.
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One false move and the space-time continuum gets it
I've always wanted to start a post with a line that could have fallen from the mouth of Jane Eyre.
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Here be dust bunnies
I've reached an interesting point at the end of my first week of full-time writing. I've written much more than I thought, so much in fact that I've written myself out into unknown territory.
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Whatever’s about to happen, I was there
And then, in my mind, a guy walked past selling t-shirts. On the t-shirts was printed 'WHATEVER'S ABOUT TO HAPPEN, I WAS THERE'. From him came a flood of other ideas, from the outbreak of civil war in a marching band to the exquisite, liberating sensation of pushing a stilt-walking juggler off a pier.
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Trench-coats. Trench coats. Trenchcoats?
Some days aren't that newsworthy: the most interesting thing to happen today was a ten-minute search of various reference texts to answer the question: 'trench-coats' or 'trench coats'? Although I found the answer, I think it's safe for me to leave you hanging over this one. You'll simply have to buy the book to find out.
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158 words — nobody panic
The more mathematically-inclined reader will have been performing some basic arithmetic during my opening panhandle and come to the ineluctable conclusion that my novel is now a mere 158 words longer than it was yesterday.
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Day Zero
There's a common misapprehension about writing that it is a modern form of alchemy. With the exception of the odd long, miserable day when it appears nothing will convert this lead to gold, writing resembles alchemy only as far as its practitioners enjoy making it seem arcane. Writing is less scientific, and tends to work something like this:
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