Best Horror

There is nothing like Japanese horror - what makes it so devestatingly real and relatable, is that it is so unimaginably cruel! The human spirit is always severely tortured and as an audience member I feel both nightmareish fear and heart-breaking compassion.

THE THOUGHT TRANSLATOR (Part Two)

Monday 13:13, Megarific Architectural Firm, Ground Floor, behind Nando’s, East London.

My boss, an overweight dragon of a woman who wore too much pink, squeezed herself into my cubicle. I could smell her bacon breath before she opened her mouth.
‘9am Friday,’ Meg spat, slapping the brief on my desk.

Jack Vettriano: What I love about his work!

The Game of Life

There is such an intimacy in his paintings - he seems to be able to capture the unspoken when there is clearly a lot to be said. I can hear the thoughts of each of his subjects and can imagine their internal dialogue - the best part being the conflict you know would exist especially in his paintings of three.

Narcissistic Bathers


Check out more of his work at http://www.jackvettriano.com/

The Thought Translator: The First 50 words.

THE THOUGHT TRANSLATOR (Part One)

The thought translator was a bad idea from the start. But I had no choice - I had to come up with a better prototype than Brad and I couldn’t do it alone - it was that or my job. In hindsight I could have found another job…

Tomorrow I'll post the next fifty words, and the day after another fifty words and so on until the story is complete!

Check back daily!!

Inspiration for my short story on the subject 'Why I love Cornwall'

The 14th Century castle on St Michael's Mount, Marazion, Cornwall.

Women's Road Race London 2012

My husband and I were lucky enough to walk down and watch this today...

 The rain stopped long enough for these ladies to ride through Twickenham ;)

Matt and I had a front seat view. Well done to the Olympic volunteers for brilliant crowd control today ;)

Catching Up...

I just spoiled myself with these two purchases...

 So many competitions, industry news and tips! Love it, love it, love it!

Yet to begin this one... but just looking at the map of Australia on the cover tells me it's going to be good ;)

Trouble Organising?

Try Wunderlist! It is free to download and helps authors to store ideas in layers. Eg you can type in story titles for short stories or novels, then expand the bar to add notes, then expand it again to add more details.

Check it out on http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/

Writers Can Only Write the Truth

In this 1933 speach delivered at Claridge’s Hotel in London Rudyard Kipling speaks about the truth in his writing.

Models walking Dogs

I don't know what I love more about this photo... Paris, the pastries, the coiffured poodle or the letter P ;)

Vogue 1999

And I have a soft spot for Great Danes...

Vogue 1956

Old Black and White Photographs

I love this photo which appeared in a 1935 edition of Vogue. Very elegant.

And this one from 1939... along a similar theme to the one I've chosen for my novel... I wrote a brand new synopsis today - this one I'm excited to expand out into a novel!

True Blood: Why it Works

After writing a one page synopsis of my novel today - drawing together all of the ideas I'd scribbled out over the last month - I was a little disappointed. What the story had boiled down to was too simple; I'd wanted simple but this seemed boarder line boring.

So I asked myself 'How is my story different? Am I excited to write it? Is it something I'd find unique and interesting enough to pick up in Waterstones and purchase? - like a book I saw in the store today titled The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson!

The answer was sadly, no.

So I looked to what is working for the Sookie Stackhouse Series author Charlaine Harris. Her novels have been turned into the highly successful HBO series True Blood. I asked myself how what she is doing is different - vampires are everywhere so how does she make the Sookie series work?

It's vampire meets mind-reader who in each season finds herself in the middle of a murder / missing person investigation and while trying to solve the mystery runs into a host of other supernatural creatures! At the same time there is a heavy romance element. So really Harris has woven three genres together - mystery, romance and horror - to create this success!

Now, to find a new angle or subplot or to create a genre-hybrid!

A Fish Quote


The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish

- Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea

After posting Gurtrude Stein's quote on the same subject - fish - I had to post this gem which I discovered in Hemingway's tale of an old man and his four day battle to haul in an 18ft marlin off the coast of Havana.

Ernest Hemingway And Henry Strater Examine The Remains Of A Huge Mutilated Blue Marlin Which Strater Fought Off Bimini In 1936.



 

My Hemingway Infatuation

Ernest Hemingway 1923 Passport Photo

I've just finished Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and today started The Old Man and the Sea and I love the way Hemingway writes for two reasons: 

The creativity/freedom of style which moves from third person to first and then to stream of consciousness doing away with needless punctuation; and the gentle banter of the dialog - which reads as everyday conversation and while being weighty in meaning is light on word count.

Stories which continue to haunt me in a beautiful way - What an absolute genius!

A Page Turning Memoir

  The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the most riverting memoir I've ever read!

It taught me a lot about the polarity of characters! The same character whom I warmed to for one action, I cringed at for another.

If you haven't already, read it!

　

How Analysing Story Threads in Breaking Bad has Helped Me Understand Degrees of Conflict

I am working on my third novel - still to be titled - and after plotting out the main thread of the story today (for the third time) and deciding on sticking to a theme for the sub-plot I was left feeling a bit flat.


Even though it was improving - because I was only including events essential to demonstrating exactly what I wanted to say (this skill has taken me 4 years to develop...and I think today was a break through because I cut out something that only diluted the story) - it still wasn't exciting enough.


So I thought of the television series I've watched recently that I thought were brilliant - Breaking Bad and True Blood - and decided to analyse the sub-plots in one of these.


I drew a spider diagram of the main sub-plots in Breaking Bad and discovered something that I thought I already knew. With each subplot/character or group of character's Walt faces conflict - not just minor-differences-of-opinion-conflict (which is what my protagonist was facing) but true heart-pounding, sweaty-palms, watery-mouth conflict! Just reading over the diagram I felt it!


I now have a better understanding of 'true conflict' and this is what I  now know I need to include in my novel.


I will keep you posted! ;)

Gertrude Stein: Bringing artists together

If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.

– Gertrude Stein

What an amazing woman - born in America in 1874, she traveled to France in 1903 where she spent the rest of her life promoting and supporting the work of other artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Her quotes are magical.