Recent content by Andrew Okey

#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" :-)

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...

And surely a spudger is also now prime candidate to be the murder weapon in your next thriller? :)

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? :-)

I recently discovered "captious" and was overjoyed because it perfectly fitted into some dialogue I was struggling to write

Ah, I used to think my first novel wasn't derivative of anything, until I realised my subconscious had simply rewritten "The lives of others", combining it with "Pan's labyrinth" whilst using the narrative structure of "Wuthering Heights". :)

I've attempted to swerve this a bit by trying to claim harmonious synergy instead; "As they share similar themes, I think my new novel xxxx would make a great companion piece to your current client's famous novel yyy". Funnily enough, that doesn't work either...

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...

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...