52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 49—Stare into the abyss long enough and it'll send you more paperwork. I wake up and it’s dark but it’s also not. Two rooms overlap with distinctly different hues; one is my bedroom in the flat, with its exposed brickwork and plain off-white walls. The light cuts through the gaps between the blinds. It’s never entirely dark because the
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 48—The eviction hearing and other waiting rooms. OK, where were we? Over the last two weeks, I've been starting to pick over the bones of the last fourteen years—oh god, has it really been that long?—in an effort to explain how I got here. How I ended up doing two PhDs, how my world fell
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 47—I got the eviction notice on my birthday. I got the eviction notice on my thirty-first birthday. I remember sitting at my table, a ridiculously big and stupid table I'd had since Lancaster days, and hearing the car engine down below. I remember that my windows overlooked the postboxes to the building, and I remember how, on that
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 46—How do I tell the story of how I got here? I have a story to tell you. It's a story I've been meaning to tell for a long time. No, wait. That's not how it goes. This is a story I never wanted to tell and I never planned to tell. It was a story I fully intended to keep
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 45—A mug fell on my head. This is not going according to plan. Not that I had a plan, but still. I say under duress because if I hadn't said I'd write every week for a year, I wouldn't write at all this week. It's Sunday evening, and I'm still burnt out. Maybe even more burnt
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 43—The coming few weeks will be a little bit different. I am digging myself up out of the burnout grave this week with a bit of an odd post. Not penguins again, but more like an introduction to the odd posts that are going to pop up in the next couple of weeks. I might have set myself an utterly
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 42—The answer to life, the universe, and everything is maybe this. I've always thought the number 42 was special because I'm a Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan. I wanted my forty-second birthday to be more special than my fortieth for that reason. If I'd made any plans to set up the forty-second week of this journey special, then they've fallen
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 41—Lessons from Writing a Series of Prompt Challenges Well, you may have noticed a bit of a change this week. It's Spooky Season, it's the last month before Nanowrimo, and it's my first week of teaching. I feel like I've been running very fast and still not keeping up with a high-powered treadmill. Oh my god. What I
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 39—From another world Hello. I'm reporting in from the stern of a narrowboat somewhere in the East Midlands of the UK. This is my first long, proper holiday since 2019, when I flew out to Rome with T and friends. After that, there was a pandemic, and although we went away for my
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 38: Shadow work for developing characters and plot For the last week, I've been digging into the idea of shadow characters and shadow work. If you haven't encountered this aspect of storytelling before, the basic concept is that characters (or even groups of characters) around the main character, represent dark features of the protagonist's psychology. This can work
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 37—I did this course so you don't have to. Allow me to hold my hand up and say I haven't written any actual fiction over the last week. That total word count has been sitting at just over 80k words for what feels like a long time. We're at a knife-edge moment, and I'm sure Maali and Arandes are
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 36—Burnt out like burnt toast Oh boy no. Last weekend was a blistering run of success, at least in terms of writing out a somewhat decent first draft of an account of Amnar, thanks to a Deck of Worlds prompt. But, as is typical of my life, the minute I get up to speed, I
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 35—Trying to Recover from Trauma (A Story About A Writing Process) Every Friday morning, sometime between the first and second coffee of the day, I have therapy for an hour. It's a tricky time to have a session like that. On the one hand, it's Friday, which means I can set up my editing week so I don't work; but on
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 34—When the thing you need to write suddenly won't work for you This week has been a crisis, climax, recovery type of week in my writing world. In order to understand this, you need to know that I write on a site called 4TheWords. It's an RPG game that's also about writing. I discovered it by accident back in March and it
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 33—Let's Talk About Writer's Block and Mental Health My god, it's week 33. How did we get here? It's been thirty-three whole weeks, and in that time I've written two halves of two different books and not done the original editing I was planning to do at all. This isn't one of those "Show up and hustle for
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 32—Tracking Words Between Nanowrimo Months I've tried to start this week's post three times. Maybe five. I'm no good at this whole blogging thing. I have no idea how to do it in 2023, when things have moved on from the days of Open Diary and just writing whatever happens to be going on in
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 31—What Matters In Storytelling As Demonstrated By Penguins Let's talk about penguins. Specifically, let's talk about how penguins can help us learn about how to write good, compelling story structure.
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 30—My therapist told me to do this. I'm writing this in bed, on a warm Friday afternoon, and I feel like bursting into tears. Maximum menstrual potential unfolding here. For a week I had a fever. As the fever died, the period struck. My cat and I have so far spent most of today in bed watching
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 29—How to make a necromantic skull Introduction You know when you get that pre-cold feeling? Hmm, yeah. That's how I'm feeling today. It's been an incredible week with my family and friends. But graduation day is a strange thing. Six years of work preparing for the PhD and doing the PhD and then finishing, and it's
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 28—A word about pronouns Intro Well, it's been a week. A real week. I've had so many different things going on, things I didn't really want to have to deal with the week before I graduate. I've been a tad stressed out, let's put it that way. I'm not comfortable explaining why because it's
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 27—Camp Nanowrimo Week 1 Introduction It's Camp Nanowrimo. Back in April, I did a whole 50k words, so I decided to set that as my goal for this summer camp. Except that once again, I've shifted gear and I'm writing the much earlier Amnar book. That'd be the one about Maali. This must be
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 26—Signs, silence, and letters to supernatural agents Introduction Technically speaking, this is halfway through my "52 Weeks of Doing Something That Might Be Writing" project. It's also the end of June and tomorrow is the start of Camp Nanowrimo. Once again, I'm veering all over the place here. I am doing the summer Camp Nanowrimo, but I'm
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 25—A pot is never "just" a pot Last week, I decided I would change how I do these weekly reviews. Forget inspirational quotes and reports on monthly goals. Forget focus and how well it went. I'm sick of trying to fit myself into the grindset mentality as though that was the only thing that mattered. So here,
52 Weeks of Editing 52 Weeks of Writing: Week 24—Life is more than this. Confessional time. I need to hold my hands up and be honest. I haven't written any fiction in a month, maybe more. I'm struggling with it again. Some of this makes sense; the last month or so has been chaotic and crazy and it's hard to find the focus or
