April 2013


This week’s TBM Great Escape: Porcelain by Benjamin Read and Chris Wildgoose.

Just up on Trapped By Monsters: some thoughts on escapism, a hint about my next few posts there and three more images like this…

Foss3

It’s from a book called Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss. Take a look.

Perhaps it happens to every writer – if so, my contemporaries seem to keep it quiet – but I’ve spent most of the last fortnight feeling like this:

GoreyUnstrungDreadful

This is from one of my very favourite books about writing – The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel by Edward Gorey. I reached the state described above at the same point I seem to reach it in almost all my writing projects – while reading a complete draft for the very first time.

The gulf between what I set out to achieve and what’s there in the book right now is vast and howling. In my previous project I had to conclude that a similar gulf was uncrossable. The possibility, which had to be faced and considered, that I might have to make the same decision again made me feel like howling, myself.

I’m past that now.

The book is looking the worst it’s ever going to look – which means, in theory at least, that from now on everything I do to it will be an improvement. Better yet, now is when I get to make the biggest and most powerful changes. Now, with something to work with, I can make this book work.

A heartfelt, inadequate THANK YOU to the people I love for helping me to get through this again.

This cheered me up too:

OSwedishEdition

It’s My Name is O, just published in Swedish. A hearty Hej! to anyone who reads it. 😀

Sam