So, there are a number of readers who object to profanity or obscenity or other “bad words”. Can’t say I’m one of them. And while I do sometimes think that popular culture has gotten a bit coarse, I don’t hold the position that I ought to have a personally-sanitized version of it. I do have […]
I have struggled over the past few years with honing my revision skills. I don’t have that much text to work with, and one of my problems is that I’m too close to it. I get some practice with folks whose work I read to critique, but it’s kind of rude to dig in and […]
Just about every writer has heard the advice, “Kill your darlings” (and if you haven’t, you just did). The advice has come to have an almost mythic quality to it. Hell, someone even titled a movie about a writer after it. The “kill your darlings” formulation apparently comes from Faulkner (who graciously specified that this […]
A perennial subject among the writers I know is whether it is better to write by hand or to type. This post in particular was prompted by my reading this post about some of the quantitative differences between writing longhand or by computer. There’s some interesting stuff in there, and in the paper it’s based […]
Looking back on my last few weeks of blog posts, one could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve spent more time writing about writing than actually writing! So, maybe a little update is in order. I have three primary projects right now, and have made some progress on all of them. First, I’m rewriting a […]
In a sense, I’ve been writing for a long time. I started writing little stories for myself in grade school (mostly inspired by television), and by the time I got to high school I was writing short stories to pass around to my friends. I even wrote a few one-act plays that were performed. In […]
A month and a half after VP, and my submission piece is about ready to go. I got a lot of good feedback and advice on this one, and (after giving it a month to sink in so the text would be fresh to me) I have finally gone through it all, listened again to […]
This weekend was busy as hell — among other things we had to finish insulating the kitchen ceiling. Three micro-centuries in a Tyvek bunny suit working over my head. Yay. But as you can see, it really needed to be done: I had expected to be trying to steal time this weekend to work on […]
Spent part of the evening talking over my short story The Body and the Bomb with Marko. This is an Inspector Crandall mystery, one I’ve several I’ve written, in which I had experimented with having a co-investigator, local Constable Nouri. One of his comments sort of threw me for a loop: I don’t really need […]
John P. Murphy 