Saturday 28 December 2013

Known unknowns

You probably shouldn't have someone's ambition be to join a super-secret organisation that they actually haven't heard of.

Friday 13 December 2013

Comparative anatomy

The heart is usually on the left hand side of the human body. Which means that if you have your arms around someone who is facing you, it is fairly unlikely that you will feel your hearts beating against each other.

Monday 9 December 2013

Pretty Peacocks

I love Chuck Wendig's blog so much that one day I will actually get around to buying his books. He has so many good things to say about the craft and process of writing (and other stuff) expressed with, um, vigour. I've occasionally had comments on my food blog about the fact that I shouldn't swear, so fuck knows what his commenters say to him.

Anyway, in a brilliant post about editing, he made a very important point - "I keep a list of crutch words and precious darlings: anything I tend to rely upon as a lazy construction or word choice or character traits, or, or, or."

I think this should be more widely used. Because at some point the fact that a writer has used the word "delicate" or "delicately" three times on one page, exceeded only by the number of times she has used the word "gasped", is going to hit the reader with a brick and ruin their buzz. Thesaurus. Get one.

Thursday 5 December 2013

Preternatural senses

You should probably know how far your average person can see on a dark night or have a good reason for extending it.

Tuesday 3 December 2013

Consistency

You really don't get to announce that a character has "never even hit someone" when they've already hit 2 people in the space of that book alone.

Sunday 1 December 2013

... and she writes

I read. I re-read. I am driven to distraction by what I am reading. It is time to stop harassing my loved ones with my rants and put them somewhere else.