Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Is It Appropriate For Bookstores To Have Bad Grammar?

I have an extreme dislike of bad grammar.  Accidental typos and honest mistakes are one thing; you learn from them and move on.  To choose bad grammar makes my skin crawl.  Click the link below for more information. Also, I don't think and apostrophe really makes a difference to a search engine.

Let It Read: Book Mark: And There Goes the Apostrophe: I came across this article a few days ago by Lindsay Johns for The Daily Mail and had to share. Waterstones: O apostrophe, where art thou...

Friday, January 20, 2012

Tone or Is It Always About Me?


I'm worried about the tone of what I'm writing.  I’ve written everyday for the last five days, which is great, but I'm concerned that my characters sound too self-indulgent.  In two of the stories I worked on this week, they’re told in first person, so they are naturally going to have more "I" in them.  The other one is third person, but still focusing on one character.  In each story, the character has a problem they have to deal with or some sort of conflict.  What do I do?  Do I think about it as I write, or deal with it later?  Is it okay to have a self-indulgent main character?

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Turning Something Old Into Something New... Or At Least Refurbished

I did some writing yesterday. If I can get ten minutes today, maybe I'll be on my way to writing everyday. What I wrote I think is the ending to a short story I had left for dead. I liked the premise of the story and the basic storyline, but it would just not come together for me. I added a love triangle because I wanted to make it more interesting, then later realized it made the story childish. Instead I'm mostly removing the other woman and I am instead going to focus on the man's extreme behaviour. I wrote this story, ten years ago, tried re-writing it five or six years ago, and now I'm trying again. Is this too much? Should I not even bother? Or if I think the new re-write could work, do I go for it?

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Does this sort of news affect new writers?

McClelland & Stewart is now 100% owned by Random House of Canada. They used to own only 25%, with the rest owned by the University of Toronto. Click the link for the full story from The National Post.
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/01/10/random-house-becomes-full-owner-of-mcclelland-stewart/

What does this mean to a writer like me? A writer like you? Writers in general?

Friday, January 13, 2012

Writing Every Day

I want to write everyday. Now that my baby boy is sleeping thought the night, I feel like I can finally have time for me. The question that has been burning me these last few months while I merely thought of writing: Do I work on my novel or vomplete my short story collection?