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In: The Paradise Motel, Uncategorized, Writing

I didn’t work on my new novel during the first six months of the year, but I was hyper-aware of it glowering in my Dropbox waiting to show me what a horrible writer I was. I did almost anything else, a short story, a book review, ran an advertising campaign, wrote copy for a website, pondered A.I., cleaned my house badly and mowed the property over and over until the temperature cooled and the grass ceased to grow. It was classic avoidance. I didn’t want to open it and see the results of that rampant, uncontrolled first draft.  Hemingway, Lamott and King advise getting comfortableRead More →

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In: The Paradise Motel, Uncategorized, Writing

When we last met, I was writing a novel synopsis, but not at the behest of an agent or publisher. I was 10 000 words into The Paradise Motel and in need of some scaffolding. The synopsis would be a living document. It needed to be strong enough to guide me, but malleable too. (If you haven’t read Plotting VS Pantsing, you might want to do so here as this post is its sequel 😳.)  Because I’d written a fair way in, I already knew my characters, what they sounded like, what they looked like.  I knew the town. But the plot was shaky. IfRead More →

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In: The Paradise Motel, Uncategorized, Writing

This post is for people who would love to write a novel. It’s on their bucket list and it doesn’t look like its going away. I get you. I am you. But there’s a few things to consider. Anyone who has given writing long form fiction some serious thought will recognise the complexity of it. It’s a bizarre magic trick and to pull it off, all you have are words. It’s crazy, right? There’s all those moving parts, setting, point of view, voice, character, plots. That’s a lot to juggle. You are a god, creating a world which doesn’t really exist, even it resembles theRead More →