Hi. My name’s Martin, and I procrastinate. [Muted applause] Look, I’m even doing it now, while trying to communicate with you about a technique I’ve employed to try to curb my procrastination! [Uncertain, slow clapping] But to jump in to the meat of the topic, I’m finding that procrastination is not the same problem it […]
Category: Writing
Everyone loves a good apocalyptic prophecy. The latest is in regards to ‘Content’, that slippery concept allied to ‘Creatives’, trashing a couple of basic grammatical rules in its attempt to escape too-close a reading.
Struggling with a form of writer’s block (tiredness leading to procrastination), I thought I’d try coming up with a few ways of dealing with the terrible spiral of guilt, exhaustion and lack of having produced something. They’re in no particular order, and they’re rules for me mostly, so pick and choose what you want:
Ebooks are not books. They’re not ‘electronic’ books. In the same way that MP3s are not vinyl and Second Life isn’t real life (who’da thunk?). The book industry is not moving to ebooks. The publishing industry is expanding from paper to electronic screens. The losers will be those who think they are moving to electronic […]
Writers should be thirsty for all the assistance offered to them. Hell, everyone who works daily to improve a skill should. And there are plenty of formulae, methods and structures out there for the writer (and I don’t mean that in any negative sense).
Jan O’Hara posts on Writer Unboxed about worrying about your stats. In this web-a-day world there’s no shortage of stats to tell us how we’re doing, how popular we are (as popular as our last post? Please, God, no!). As a blogger, and a writer who can only get his Bad Self published online, there’s […]
David Hume (1711-1776) was, amongst other things, a philosopher. In his essay Of Tragedy (included in the Four Dissertations volume) he explores the reasons why humans are so keen on tragedy. Tragic plays include scenes of joy only to better plunge the audience into the next dramatic act. But push the audience – or reader […]
A note about a great anthology project which should interest writers and readers of Science Fiction, as well as Creative Commons fans (I fit into all these categories, which must be why I liked it so much!).
As a geeky writer of Science Fiction (or Speculative Fiction when in polite company), and as also as a fan of Creative Commons, my eye was caught by a short story released under a Creative Commons license. And this was no half measure – the authors want feedback and alterations! (Kudos to the OMG! Ubuntu! […]
I was listening to an old Sitepoint podcast which is about the future of publishing in a digital world. More specifically, it’s about how and why print publishing can stand alongside digital publishing, especially when the latter offers free, easy-to-store content at your convenience. The podcast offers a host of technical and, as they term […]