Blog posts - page 46
A Knock on the door
15 Jun 2016 stories
I wrote this in response to a prompt over at Terribleminds.com. It’s a bit rough, but I hope you enjoy
Shake-Up
Feeding my writing through a digital shredder
07 Jun 2016 poetry
About a year ago, I got frustrated with my writing and decided to mess around with my first drafts and discarded attempts at stories. They had been languishing on my hard drive for years. I wasn’t publishing them and they weren’t being seen by anyone. To be honest, most of the stories just weren’t very good.
So I destroyed them. Well, no, not quite. I fed them one by one through a digital shredder, like this. It works using Markov chains to generate words. Surprisingly, this creates new phrases. It makes no sense, but more than you...
May Link Round-up
02 Jun 2016 link round up
Another month gone already. It feels like no time at all since I wrote my last link roundup, but here we are again. This month I’ve mostly been reading The Bone Clocks & Wonderbook, but in between there’s been a number of good articles.
Firstly, sad news as The Toast announced it is shutting up shop on July 1st. It’s a wonderful resource of humour and literacy, but also publishes more serious longer articles. There’s nothing quite like it on the internet so it is an incredible shame to see it go. Still though, in its last...
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
24 May 2016 book review
I’ve been a fan of David Mitchell since reading Cloud Atlas in my early twenties. Since then, I have enjoyed almost everything he has written, so I was excited to finally get round to The Bone Clocks. I’ve somehow never tackled it, possibly because at 500 pages it’s quite a time investment.
One of the strengths of his fiction is the unexpected, which The Bone Clocks has in spades. It’s similar in structure to Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten, where every chapter has a new character and new perspective. What he does incredibly well within this framework is disrupt...
'Show Your Work!' Six weeks in
17 May 2016 creativity
I mentioned in a previous post how I was inspired to share more of my writing byShow Your Work! by Austin Kleon. This little book has been surprisingly helpful in sharing work, but also producing it. Six weeks into following some of the principles, I thought I would expand on how it has helped me.
Radiohead and the importance of letting ideas gestate
11 May 2016 music
I’ve been hugely excited to listen to the new Radiohead album A Moon Shaped Pool. It’s really good, thankfully. There’s lush, layered sounds and a strange type of orchestration, with genuine emotion in a number of the songs.
Links and Things I liked in April
06 May 2016 link round up
Here, in no particular order, are some things I enjoyed over the last month:
'Birdman', Superhero Films and Spectacle
27 Apr 2016 films
Riggan: How about Jeremy Renner?
Jake: Who?
Riggan: Jeremy Renner. He was nominated. He was the Hurt Locker guy.
Jake: Oh, okay. He's an Avenger.
Riggan: Fuck, they put him in a cape too?
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan- Book Review
21 Apr 2016 book review
I picked this short novella up recently and devoured it in about a day. Having previously read some of Ian McEwan’s later novels such as Saturday and On Chesil Beach, I wasn’t expecting such a violent and horrible little story. It deals with four children left abandoned in their house when both their parents die, and the unpleasantness that follows their isolation.
The Work Never Stops
18 Apr 2016 creativity
After I published my first book of short stories, Amber Stars, I took a week off writing. I enjoyed the achievement of actually finishing a project and publishing a book. So I kicked back, read some books, browsed the web a lot and created absolutely nothing.