Andrew Okey

Andrew Okey · Mar 11, 2020

#100daysofwriting Day 43, or thereabouts. I have just written my obligatory once-per-novel sex scene. Haunted by the ghost of The Bad Sex Awards, I kept my language suitably tangential, the nearest to anything directly descriptive being the word "bestride"

Andrew Okey · Mar 8, 2020

So, my WIP is about magical thinking and is set in ...Venice, during the plague. And my protagonist is painting a picture that features a large pile of bodies in the foreground, but fears he will summon up exactly that reality via his art. And now the bit of my rationalist brain that is still superstitious (and makes me wear my lucky scarf at the football) just wants me to stop writing... :-(

Andrew Okey · Mar 4, 2020

Setting out up the mountains today and the Cumbrian weatherline is reporting "a skittering of snow above 300m". I've used skittering in other contexts, but isn't that a rather lovely usage, eh?

Andrew Okey · Feb 10, 2020

I hit one of those BIG set-pieces this morning - y'know, the scene you're really looking forward to writing. Whoosh! 1000 words in 90 minutes. So I pack my shinpads and head off to play footy and it's only when I step onto the pitch that I realise that I let my protagonist spends that 1000 words in the company of a "wife" he won't actually meet for another two years in the narrative. Gah!

Andrew Okey · Jan 30, 2020

100 days of writing, day 3/100. Besieged by migraine and man-flu, I only edited today. Specifically, I waged war on the two plot threads in my WIP that are superfluous if not actually confusing. Hack! Cut! Slice! Somehow at the end of this process my total word count has gone up slightly, a loaves-and-fishes miracle that I find absurdly pleasing.

Andrew Okey · Dec 6, 2019

Truly, the only thing worse than failure is the faint prospect of success.

I've been invited to pitch the WIP to DHH Literary tomorrow, at their pitching event in Liverpool. It's still more than 24 hours before I even get on the train down there and already I cannot eat, sleep (I've been awake since 4am), sit still or think clearly...

Andrew Okey · Nov 15, 2019

Ah, the bizarre world of the aspiring historical novelist. My last three web searches have been "Elizabethan bawdy song lyrics", "period pain symptoms" and "Are all angels male?"

Andrew Okey · Sep 26, 2019

Just got my current WIP long-listed for this year's Adventures in Fiction New Voices award. This time last year my completed novel got short-listed, so I guess the staffers there must like my writing style...