Claire Waller

Congratulations Alan. Excellent news. As Raine says, do let us know how the course goes!

Yes, sorry, meant to congratulate the worthy winner – great, unsettling and dreamlike tale that owns the innate silliness of the tiny guitar and the bizarre phenomenon of the vast ukulele band. Great stuff, and thanks Sea for a challenging and fun competition

Congratulations Jonathan, fascinating story – sounds like there’s a lot more to it than in the words on the virtual page. And congratulations to everybody who entered. I’m in awe of how you manage to come up with stories at the drop of a hat. Every month I read the prompts and think I’ll have a go but somehow I never do. Maybe this month….

Oh, well done, @alanr! That’s fantastic. So which course are you going for?

That’s great Alan, well done. The courses sound superb

AAARRRGGHHH! (as it used to say in my comics)

Up with the count. Resisted the temptation to count the 2500 “seed” words that I had before the start. I think I’ll have a couple of hundred more to do before I give up tonight. Remarkable difference in the way I feel about making myself write at this pace which, honestly, isn’t that high a word…[Read more]

I haven’t entered a comp for a while though lack of time but this one intrigued me and my entry is short.

I suppose it’s a form of Writer’s Block – except that I can’t stop writing. Does that make sense? Probably not. Think of it as writing your way around the surface of a Klein bottle. Yes! That’s it exactly. Thank you. I know where I am now. I…[Read more]

Last day to put in an entry for the Den monthly competition, people… 🙂

I’m pretty sure I’ll get the words down. But right now I have only the vaguest plan and I can’t think of even a working title.

Well, I’m feeling a tad more apprehensive than in previous years. There’s a certain investment in succeeding this time – for me. Well, succeeding in writing the requisite number of words anyway. My record is one complete children’s story, one block of 50K words that I eventually deleted, two failures.

I think we all did that with our first book Raine! And some of us, with our second…

I know what you mean, Hilary. And FWIW I try now not to worry too much about the minutiae of all the different (with a lot of similarities) theories of story structure. That way lies madness for me. I read them and enjoy them and sometimes I get a light bulb moment and often some part of them sticks in my mind and comes to the fore when I’m trying…[Read more]

Very interesting blog. I, too, have listened, enthralled, to Craig’s lectures on this, and have read an enormous amount of stuff about structure. I’m struggling rather with it now, at the almost-finished-the-second-draft-of-my-novel-stage. I don’t know if my struggle is because I’ve read too many different models/descriptions and have become…[Read more]

Still missing three quarters of the story….

Ah, yes. Planning. It’s going…um…

That’s the most important bit done.