Recent content by MaryA

Oh Rachel, it makes me so happy to read this! Well done. Pfft to the doubting son.

Congrats @Marc Joan!

Welcome, James!

I've been thinking about this for a few days, so please excuse the length. The term ‘folk realism’ is something of an oddity, isn’t it? Somewhere between folk horror and magical realism. I read an article a while back on the ‘folk horror’ classics of British cinema in the late 1960s and early...

Tea. English breakfast tea (black or with a little milk), oolong tea, mint tea with fresh mint from the garden, green tea, a killer chai from Mombasa, or just Five Roses tea bags in boiling water. Every now and again I take rooibos tea black, honeybush tea, a mug of steeped lemon verbena leaves...

This is a good thread for thinking things through! I believe each and every one of us, writers or not, has our own distinctive voice. Others recognise it when they hear or read us, we use certain phrases, we have little quirks and accents that are distinctively ours. That voice comes out in...

So pleased to see this, @Robinne Weiss!

As @Katie-Ellen Hazeldine knows, I'm also a big fan of Alan Garner. I don't know this book, but was immediately caught up in the opening. There's a scene with a fence and a highway which tells me these two are on their way somewhere. The way they talk to each other is easy, teasing, intimate...

I don't know history will be any kinder to us who are writing across the 20th and 21st centuries, do you? All kinds of everyday assumptions and blind spots could suddenly reveal our own little bubbles of privilege and unconscious assumptions to a more judgmental generation. At the same time...

Up early on Monday and looked at notes I made during the Discord audio Litopia seminar last night. Did morning pages. Then worked on WIP scene in salt marshes, 600 words. Onward, but not necessarily upward.

It depends in part on whether you're writing commercial realist fiction, doesn't it @Howard? 'Made-up' is a question of perception and if you want to keep a smart reader turning pages, she or he will want to feel you know what you're talking about. Accuracy matters. Even if you write about...

Welcome to the Colony! I've always found the witch trials at Pendle Hill fascinating. Looking forward to reading some of your work here.

I don't know you need that famous 'ice splinter' in your heart, but some distance helps with objectivity. Should we write only what we know? I went and looked at Ursula le Guin's Rules for Writing: As for “Write what you know,” I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good...

Some writers are chameleons. I think of the Australian writer Peter Carey because he seems to invent a new voice for each book and sometimes each character. Not a superficial change: what he did when he wrote his 'biography' of Ned Kelly began with a letter written by the young Kelly defending...

Lorrie Moore is one of my favourites. Thanks, @Amber.