Collaborative Writing of a Story Cycle: Salome Jones on Red Phone Box
Almost two years ago now, I was very honoured to be invited to contribute to a wonderful project called Red Phone Box. It is a collected, interwoven set of writings
Make Better: Critical Writing Friends and Process
I am very fortunate to have two excellent supervisors for my PhD. My primary supervisor oversees my theoretical and critical work, my secondary supervisor acts in the spirit of a critical friend. She reads the work I’m producing for the creative part of the PhD, and gives me very good, very deep critiques. I thought […]
Censorship & Concrete Remedies: Who do you link to?
It occurred to me that as I waxed philosophical in my last post on censorship and the vagaries of being a writer of erotic fiction, I did not suggest any remedies. It’s all very well to bitch and philosophize, but offering solutions is far more constructive. While we’re all tearing our hair out about Kobo, […]
So Close, And Yet So Far: POV and Head Hopping in Erotic Fiction
One of the most common mistakes I see new writers make is something called head hopping: the act of showing what more than a single character is thinking in a scene. Basically, what is happening is the writer is switching from the POV of one character to the other and back again. If knowing what […]
The Duties of an Author and the Responsibilities of a Reader
There are aspects of the rise of online booksellers, e-books, reader-reviews and the general phenomena surrounding reading and the internet that I like very much. But there are also parts of it I abhor. Self-publishing, the rise of small e-book presses and the refusal of publishers to do the marketing they once did has meant […]
To Think or Not to Think… In Which Your Faithful Narrator Rebuts Palahniuk’s Banishing of the Thought Verbs
First, have a read of this very interesting essay by Chuck Palahniuk on ‘thought’ verbs and why you shouldn’t use them. Hopefully, I haven’t lost you. I’m going to attempt to put together some robust arguments for why I think he’s wrong. Not completely wrong. A great deal of what he says is true, makes […]
On Kissing
First, I’d like to acknowledge my blatant thievery. The title is a shameless appropriation from Derrida’s book on Jean Luc Nancy: On Touching. It’s a damn difficult read and I’ve never made it all the way through. It’s one of those texts that, unless you’re doing a dissertation on Nancy or Derrida, probably works best […]
Problematic POVs
I’ve been reading through the submissions for the Under The Skin antho and doing some writing myself, and pondering the issue of problematic POVS. There are some pretty hard and fast rules about POV, but there are a lot of grey areas where the way forward is not quite clear. Literary fiction is typically (but […]
The Sweet & Brutal Jouissance of the Story
Firstly, I’d like to call your attention to an interesting series of posts called On The Art of Erotica going on at EroticWriter.wordpress.com hosted by Will Crimson. The first post is by him (Three Ways to Take a Woman), the second by me (The Wages of Sin), and there will be more going up in […]
Dear Mr. Banks, I’ll Miss You or #CultureShipName GSV Inconvenient Departures
One of my favourite authors died yesterday. Iain Banks, or Iain M Banks (the name he used for his sci-fi books) took his leave of us too soon, too young, with too many great ideas left unwritten. He had a way of examining human issues by constructing stories like spectrum analyzers. Plots built to flay […]