The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield My rating: 2 of 5 stars This is an odd book which is kind of a stream of consciousness rant about the ways in which an artist struggles with what the author calls “Resistance.” That in itself is…
Happy New Year to all. I don’t usually make New Year resolutions but this year I do have one – a complex one but only one, nevertheless. This year, I resolve to work on not relating to the “Tales of Mere Existence – Project” video, embedded below.
I was a rebel for National Novel Writing Month, this year, albeit a tame one. Instead of starting a new novel, I used NaNo as an excuse/permission to put away a draft which was becoming a spaghetti bowl of potential plot threads and spend a month simply writing from the start again, knowing my characters…
I have just posted this on The StoryCraft Blog and, since hosting #storycraft has been such a big part of my life these last 18 months (often my only regular appointment for the week,) I think it’s significant enough to post here on my personal blog, too. For those of you who have come here…
When we were first in Japan and met other expats I took to asking them what they had brought in their air shipment, at first as a conversation starter but I soon realised that the answers could be quite revealing. Whether an expat was an ICT (Inter-Company Transfer) with an air shipment (which is usually…
After almost 12 months of ordering inks and pens from Pear Tree Pens, I realised that I was loyal to them not only because of the samples they offered (pictured left) but because of the personal service I received, despite that it was an online shop and so part of the interwebs what is destroying the customer…
In my introductory post to my recent series on the Sailor Jentle, 2011 Limited Edition Collection, I mentioned that limited editions were difficult, if not impossible to “sample”. Sampling fountain pen inks was something I discovered when I returned to Sydney and found that it was nigh on impossible to find inks that weren’t…
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read this book immediately after being disappointed by It was the Best of Sentences, It was the Worst of Sentences, so I may have been primed to have an overly enthusiastic reaction to a book…
It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences by June Casagrande My rating: 2 of 5 stars I was expecting something different from this book. The back of book blurbs used phrases like “wickedly funny” and “you’ll laugh all the way to writing better” (the former is a sentence, I know,)…
For those who are not aware, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, when writers (from all over the globe, despite the name) commit to starting a new novel on November 1st and write 50,000 words of a first draft by November 30. Obviously, the main point is to create a community to encourage and cajole…
