Tag: editor

Too Big for its Blogge

24th June 2018

I hold a record! As of last Saturday it is possible that I am the most acupunctured man in England, certainly the most that that particular practitioner has ever used. But then I did tell her to shove them anywhere if it helps. I was in the fallout of a terrible injury to my arm and hand and shoulders following a fallout with my lawnmower as to whether or not it was going to start. It did but my goodness it was angry about it. I’ve actually spent more money in repairing myself from the mower than it cost me to buy that wretched self drive first place. It was too big for the gardening round that was its task. It was too big for its boots. It has been retired.

But I’m back off the bench and my shoulders feel great. Well, they’re alright, but they were great just after all the prickly business. Anna asked me how I felt when she came to pick me up and I said I felt good enough to punch a tree. She told me that she was driving us home. Continue reading “Too Big for its Blogge” →

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A Symphony in Blog

11th March 2018

I’m in the middle of a chain reaction. Well, I’ve started one. Let me throw in some context to help explain. I’m knackers to nougat still with editing The Brine in Me. These things take a little time, although this novel being a fictional autobiography, it is principally pretty linear. At least you might like to think so.

People’s life stories come in a variety of distance between the subject, the telling, and the reader, and having lived with Derek Gainsborough inside my head over two novels, I know him well enough to know that he’s not the kind of guy who’s going to research his life and get all the details in order. Continue reading “A Symphony in Blog” →

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Blogged Down in Technology

16th February, 2018

News from the front! I have my copy of The Brine in Me back from the editor in Scotland! I’ve had a cursory glance through the first few screens (they left as pages but came back as screens. It’s probably none of my business). You don’t get away with a lot. The Brine is written as autobiography, and Mr Derek Gainsborough does not intend to muster all the incidents of his life into the correct timeline, he just wouldn’t write that type of autobiography. I forget to tell the editor this was an approach and not an effort to make life difficult. Which to be fair it probably has been. But the stuff that I mean I mean. The rest are just genuine mistakes and it must be thrilling for the editor to get to imagine which is which, which she is very good at. Good editors are like mind whisperers, they pick up on the intent behind the incandescent yelling of your mind-on-page and turn the faders down a little. Clever business, but I like to be at the yelling end. Continue reading “Blogged Down in Technology” →

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Paradise Blogged

9th November 2017

Is ball-deep the term? It’s not one that I really ever choose to deploy so I might be misappropriating it here. Let’s just let me apologise and I’ll do my best to explain.

I’m ball deep into the second draft of The Brine in Me, and second drafts are funny company. Not that I’m keeping much company at the moment. There’s deadlines to meet, and that encroaching realisation that something inherently private in creation is going to be handed over to someone. An editor, which although still technically makes them a someone, they are so in an entirely different understanding of the word, enough to make you make sure that your novel makes sense on the page and not just in your head. That’s what a second draft is like, if like me you write the first draft wholesale without too much prior restraint. So far it would seem that it has made sense; if my explaining of that has also made sense, and ball-deep was the term, then well done me.

Let’s talk about melody. Continue reading “Paradise Blogged” →

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