Finding a daily dose of inspiration with #vss365 to brighten up the edges of January
Tag: writing
A summer of [BLANK]
On what to do with a summer’s break
News Bash
Today I return to the Dust Lounge to move some dust around, and generally bash your eyes with NEWS, sweet NEWS. And this news doesn’t involve any voting, politics or fact-checking so y’all can relax.
Do you write with plots or pants?
Here’s the question – are you a plotter or a pantser?
Do you work out the ins-and-the-outs of what’s going to be happening in that story you’re about to tell, or do you sit down and let your pants take you where they will?
Are you an organised planner, or do you set a fire under yourself and write by the seat of your literary pants?
Chatting with Mark A King – author of Metropolitan Dreams
Today I am all sorts of pleased to welcome Mark A King to the Dust Lounge. The author of brilliant debut novel Metropolitan Dreams, and general all around top dude, we chatted about all things bookish, inspiration and cheese.
So without further ado, let’s get down to the good stuff.
Are you NaNoWriMo-ing?
Are you? Well, are you? Of course, if you’ve not heard of NaNoWriMo, then there’s a fairly high possibility that you think I might be talking about some new trendy form of high-rise city slicker drug parties, or perhaps a new type of technical hackery that’s gradually taking over the interwebs when we’re not watching. But no, this would be the yearly foray into writing a shedload of words in not a lot of time and generally doing ALL OF THE WRITING YOU POSSIBLY CAN. I did it last year, and it was great fun, and I was massively knackered…
The FlashDogs are back and this time they’re even shorter
It’s been a while since the FlashDogs have been out and about, prowling the digital streets, releasing fine paper beasts of flash fiction into the wild and raising money for charity. This is sad, because I missed them. But it’s good, because they’re each up to other things, other projects, and that is all very exciting. But now they’re back with a twitterfied version of even shorter fictions. This time they’re working with the VERY SHORT STORY. Stories short enough to fit in a single tweet, but big enough to make you laugh or make you cry or make you…
On cover design. Because it matters.
I love covers.
I really love covers.
I’m not talking about musical covers. (As an aside, if we were talking about musical covers then I’d point you in the direction of Tori Amos’s Strange Little Girls album. Just covers. Just bloody awesome.)
I’m talking about book covers.
Creative Input: Turning up the heat
It’s holiday season – time for ice cream and deck chairs and the aromatic burn of barbecues. It’s time for mosquito bites and criss-crossed tan lines. It’s time for my legs to shine bright like matchstick beacons during the one week of the year they’re let out from their shroud of denim. And this year, for the first time in five years, I partook of an actual holiday. A holiday in the sun. A break from the pressure and the strains of everyday life. And I went italianing. It was hot. And it was the best of holidays. Good friends,…
