Jason Arnopp's Blog: Jason Arnopp's Blog, page 13

Brandy In The Basement

Look at that!  The cover of the new collaboration between me and the author JMR Higgs.  As you may be able to discern, it's a combination of the artwork for Higgs' short novel The Brandy Of The Damned and my novella Beast In The Basement.  An AA-sided ebook, if you will.

Love how those covers slot together.

The idea arose, in our communal work space (the pub), of bundling two of our books together for a super special price.  They're both stories we're proud of and which...

Brandy In The Basement!

Look at that!  The cover of the new collaboration between me and the author JMR Higgs.  As you may be able to discern, it's a combination of the artwork for Higgs' short novel The Brandy Of The Damned and my novella Beast In The Basement.  An AA-sided ebook, if you will.

Love how those covers slot together.

The idea arose, in our communal work space (the pub), of bundling two of our books together for a super special price.  They're both stories we're proud of and which...

The Pomodoro Technique

This fairly well-known time management method dates back to the 1980s.  I was using the thing a while back, then drifted out of it.  I've recently adopted it again and feel it's here to stay.  I wanted to draw your attention to all things Pomodoro, in case you were unaware and it might be of use.

While I maintain that things like Twitter are great for writers and that procrastination is often an important part of writing in itself, there's no doubt that too much procrastina...

A Sincere Warning About Available Ebook Formats

Relax, this isn't really a warning at all.  Ho ho, got you there, eh?  Eh?

Just wanted to let you know that the ebook version of my 10,000-word ghost story A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home is now available directly from me in a Triple Pack of ebook formats: Kindle, ePub and PDF.  That covers pretty much every device and platform, so you now have no excuse not to scare the living Christ out of yourself.

What's more, once you've coughed up your £0.96 (yes, same price...

Writing And Spammer-Baiting

Being the eagle-eyed reader you are - one who I'd have to get up pretty damn early to fool - you'll have noticed that I haven't written much about writing on this blog of late.

That's because I've been writing.

Mainly, I've been writing a TV pilot script and its novelised adaptation at the same time.  This is an unusual endeavour, I'll grant you, but I'm enjoying it a great deal.  This, despite the mad self-imposed deadline on the novel, which means I need to write an average of 3000...

Twitter Promotion Vs Twitter Cold Calling

Hello you! 

Thought I'd try posting this amusing and yet thought-provoking tale as a Storify piece.

Let's give it a spin... [View the story "Twitter Promotion Vs Twitter Cold Calling" on Storify]

What do you think, readers? God knows, I've got the self-promotion/spam balance wrong in the past when it comes to promoting my books via the Twitters. For me, the key thing isn't how genuine and well-meaning Grimnian Promotions are - they may well be the most splendidly valiant outfit on Twitter for all I know - but how they initially came across. And then, of course, how unreasonable one of them became. Speak your brains in comments below!

                                                                         * * *

Want to feel afraid in your own home?  My 10,000-word short story A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home can help.  Presented as a letter to YOU which is delivered to YOUR house, this grave warning from the previous resident tells you things you really don't want to hear.  A Sincere Warning... can be purchased as a low-cost ebook or as a uniquely personalised physical letter which is mailed to your home address!  Full details at ScaryLetter.com

My horror novella Beast In The Basement is a dark, twisted tale of obsession, revenge, censorship, blame culture and parental responsibility.  In a big house in the countryside, an increasingly unstable author toils over a new hotly-anticipated novel which will close the best-selling trilogy of Jade Nexus books.  A violent incident tips him into a downward spiral with horrific consequences.  Read it before someone spoilers you!  Beast is available for Kindle (which can be read on most devices) at Amazon UK, Amazon US and more.  More details here.

My Amazon-acclaimed non-fiction ebook How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else is out now on Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon Germany, among others.  You can also buy it direct from me, in a Triple Pack of all three major file-types (PDF, ePub, Kindle), via PayPal.  Full details here, you splendid individual.

John Yorke's New Book. Plus: Win A Three-Day Course With Him!

Some writers worship at the altar of script structure, toiling over their inciting incidents and midpoints, while others go out of their way to shun that kind of thing.  The latter bunch often worry that overly prescriptive structural tenets will limit their creativity and reduce their work to formulaic pap.

John Yorke has written a book which makes a great case for the whole Structure Vs No Structure debate being based on a false dichotomy.  We all, John argues, end up adhering to f...

Win A Three-Day John Yorke Course! Plus: New Book Reviewed

Some writers worship at the altar of script structure, toiling over their inciting incidents and midpoints, while others go out of their way to shun that kind of thing.  The latter bunch often worry that overly prescriptive structural tenets will limit their creativity and reduce their work to formulaic pap.

John Yorke has written a book which makes a great case for the whole Structure Vs No Structure debate being based on a false dichotomy.  We all, John argues, end up adhering to f...

Love Them And Leave Them

Been thinking about a bizarre contradiction in the way we writers need to work, throughout our careers.
We have to choose projects which we properly love.  Projects which mean something to us and which we connect with in some way, even if we’re not entirely sure how.  We need to carefully foster the idea, from that initial brain-spark all the way through to final draft.  It’s a long, laborious process, especially in prose: and what keeps us at it is love.  That connection t...

Where Are We Now? March 2013

This occasional new blog format was inspired by the mighty Warren Ellis, who semi-regularly posts Who I Am And Where To Find Me status updates over at his gaff.  Although in my case, this exercise is really more for my benefit than anyone else's...

So.  Where are we now, in March 2013?

I'm Jason Arnopp, scriptwriter and author.  Used to be a journalist but I'm all better now.

I love to watch or read anything with some form of intensity or great characters.  Ideally both.  I...