Black Heart Magazine has published three of my poems and they can be read by clicking through the link. Their magazine is pretty cool as far as literary journals are concerned. After all, their masthead boldly declares “independent literature for people who rock”. Just what do you suppose that does for an aged indie musician’s heart? Anyhooo… I would give them a double thumbs up even if they...Read More Here...

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November 5th, the day before some sort of election I’ve been told, I received 23 robocalls before 5:00PM when I unplugged the phone line. Another 7 calls were an actual person. When I asked for their home phone number in return for my time they hung up. Last week, during a moment of frustration, I asked one of the pollers to describe their favorite sexual position. When they had the audacity to claim I was being rude I explained...Read More Here...

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Debi Alper and I have just finished teaching our online course in Self-Editing Your Novel (a new one starts in January), and one of the questions that came up as everyone collapsed in a heap after six weeks of learning how to re-vision, re-visit, re-vise, re-write and sometimes re-build their novel was, "When do you stop?" When do you say, "That's it," and send it out, or put it away for some months, or give up and start the next thing?

I blogged ages ago about the rather but not totally erroneous idea that it's possible to "edit out the freshness", and I often link to my blog about not fiddling. With anything the size of a novel you could always change bits, and yet in the end you do have to stop.

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It’s in the nature of crime novels to require planning and various methods of structuring were touched on, such as moveable post-it notes, plotting as for a theatrical play, the ‘snowflake’ method, mind-maps, linear forms that include a time-line or calendar, and chapter lists. Planning, says Leigh, can be done away from the desk – pondering how to dispose of a dead body while standing in a check-out queue is the norm for a crime-writer. Thinking about writing, according to Leigh, is often the most creative and important part – the writing itself mere ‘secretarial’.



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After I finished playing at the Keweenaw Co-Op yesterday I stopped at Good Times Music. Nels, the owner, showed me the new Morgan Monroe Solid Body electric mandos they just released two weeks ago. They are made in China but, after a bit of setup work, I was surprised at...Read More Here...

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Today the Keweenaw Co-Op is having another customer appreciation day. They will be passing out samples and featuring live music from 10AM until 7PM. Yours truly will be playing mando/fiddle/concertina for two hours beginning at noon. Stop in for...Read More Here...

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I've blogged before about procrastination, whether it's happening because your Inner Critic has found a dozen reasons for you Not Getting On With It, or he's declaring that it's all been done already, or he's dressed up as someone else to persuade you. Or sometimes you've simply run out of fuel, or you're just suffering from the simple reluctance to jump into the water and start swimming.

But you know the one where you do just about anything except write until the last minute, and then scribble madly into the night? Students do it, as do journalists, and of course sometimes it's genuinely because life is busy. But sometimes - often, let's admit - it's not that you genuinely didn't have the time, not really: by shedding some more trivial stuff you could perfectly well have started last week, or this morning, and you just didn't.

Some of us (perhaps the journalists, in particular?) rationalise it as needing to build up a head of steam to propel us forward, which is not entirely untrue: we resist fiercely until fear of the disaster looming if we don't do it gets bigger than than the fear of... what? - that's fuelling our resistance.

I don't tend to do it with writing, but I do it with a lot else in life.

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Yes, we had a strike in the yard during the big electrical storm October 25th. It tripped the main breakers outside the house, which would have been fine, but not satisfied with that inconvenience it sought other avenues before returning to ground. One of the avenues taken was actually a boulevard to and through the garage. It actually blew the doors off the service panels dropping power to ...Read More Here...

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Or wondering why on earth anyone (let alone you) would spend a whole month madly writing a "novel" which will definitely be be too short - and is highly liketly to be too rubbishy - to sell?

Here's my take on why you might...

Emma

I've recently relocated from Cape Town, South Africa, to Germany.

Consequently, although I have retained some clients in South Africa, it's going to be necessary at this stage of life to find and cultivate some new ones, probably in the UK and/or the US, because of the language issue.

I think I can probably say with confidence that I'm the only person in Germany who speaks no German. I have learnt one sentence, however, which is the equivalent of "I'm sorry, it's terribly embarrassing, but I'm afraid I can't speak any German. I've only been here for (insert number of weeks) weeks, so you'll have to excuse me."

Well, all right, purists - it's two sentences. I am ridiculously proud of them, though, and together they have extricated me from many a linguistic stand-off. In fact, they have probably averted a couple of nasty international incidents.

One thing is important, though: the subtle distinction between "can't" speak German, and "don't" speak German. You have to get it right. "Can't" speak German, of course, implies an inability to speak the language, whereas "won't" is a completely different kettle of chrysanthemums indicating a stubborn unwillingness to have a go at the local lingo.

I was an abominably lazy little brute at school, and shucked off the dreaded coils of Latin at the earliest opportunity. I couldn't see what future benefits an almost-extinct 2,000-year-old language held for me, so I chucked it.

Now I face afresh a linguistic miasma of articles and complicated verb conjugations, and I am transported back to that faraway Latin class when, as a boy of 13, I daily faced the headmaster's cane for my almost total inability to do as the Romans did. (I've never forgotten that cane, actually. Not only was I more intimately acquainted with it than I would ever have wished, but I recall it had thick string tightly wound around the handle end of it so that the trembling old soak could get a better grip on it in his sweaty hand. Afternoons were never good for him; on his breath there would often be the subtle aroma of something that came in a bottle and gave liquid comfort to the headmasters of this world.)

However, I digress. Back to the language issue. Those of you who have been to France - and Paris in particular - will have noticed the little flags in shop windows indicating the languages supposedly spoken within. There'll be a British flag, with the legend 'English spoken here' next to it; beneath it an Italian one, and so on. You get the gist of it.

Because of certain irreversible historical events, however, the French - again, mostly the Parisians, although I've never understood why - retain a healthy dislike of all things British. What the legend next to the British flag in the window actually means is "Yes, we do speak perfectly adequate English. But we're not going to".

Germans, on the whole, are able to speak English, at least to some degree. School-age youngsters in particular can generally speak it quite well, and with the possible exception of those Germans of advanced years, they can usually make themselves understood. Before someone gets on their high horse, however, let me make it clear that I fully embrace Angela Merkel's diktat which says I ought to be able to speak German and integrate myself into the culture, or else go home. And I'm working on it; I really am.

I miss the UK; I really do. About two hundred years ago now, it seems, I trod the venerated halls of academia there, where - among other things - I was taught something which my father had inculcated into me from the very beginning: a love of language and of the written word. I suppose it was unavoidable that my career would be one that involved words. All my life I've worked in broadcasting, print journalism and editing, and I've never let go of the conviction that part of the mission of those who write for public consumption is surely to use language correctly, with wit and style.

I've been a member here for three or four days, and there is an impressive collection of talented people here. It's good to be a part of Write Words, and I wish you all well in your varied writing endeavours.