Improviser, please One of the ticks of the writing community I loathe is the use of “pantser” (for seat-of-the-pants-er) to describe people who don’t outline. Pantser brings to mind a middle school boy who yanks down other people’s trousers. Not exactly the kind of person I want to be associated …
Cinematic carnage Last night, I rewatched one of my favorite film, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano’s Hana-Bi (Fireworks)[1]. Hana-bi is a violent film, but its use of violence is radically different than most other films. Kitano rarely shows the entirety of the violence, nor does he foreshadow it. In one of the …
“Jinxx isn’t smart; she’s a genius. One of those people so far out on the outlier screen that if you include her in your scatter plot, you either stretch the chart across two pages and jam all the regular smart people into the first half page or you leave her …
This is my current reading list: It is almost certain this list will change, but of those titles, only the last is a Young Adult (YA) novel—and it was originally published as an adult novel in Australia. Given my aspirations as a writer, this list is all wrong. I should …
The above rights-infringing work sitting on a bus stop bench is my personal reward for finishing my first draft. Technically, it’s not my first draft, since it switches the last two chapters and has a significant number of other edits. But I’ll call it the official record of the first …
I suck at plotting. I’m the writer who writes chapter after chapter of people sitting around and having tea, developing their characters so deeply that I start mimicking their gestures as I type. I really do this. It’s embarrassing. Don’t do this in front of other people, particularly if …
But juicy prizes are juicy prizes and taking some time to distill my plot to a skull, clavicle and hip bone isn’t necessarily a bad project. So today I introduce the Official Tweet-sized Pitch™ of The Forty-Seven Words of the Broken Girl