Icy Sedgwick's Blog, page 51
July 21, 2016
Premature Burial: Lived Once, Buried Twice
Fear of premature burial reaches that primal part in all of us that Sigmund Freud surveyed in his 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’. Edgar Allan Poe explored the horrors of premature burial in his 1844 story, ‘The Premature Burial’. Stephen King even skirted the edges of the fear with his short story, ‘Autopsy Room Four’. In it,...
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July 14, 2016
Cemetery superstitions: How to avoid bad luck in a graveyard
Cemeteries are either fascinating monuments to social history, or eerie gardens populated by the dead. The decline in the popularity of burial and the relocation of post-death practices to undertakers rather than families has created an aura of mystery around death, particularly nowadays. Cemetery superstitions still hold sway, even now. But earlier eras had a different...
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July 11, 2016
Awful first drafts are not the end of the world
Awful first drafts probably make up the bulk of the tweets I see about writing. If you’re reading this, then many of your contacts are probably writers. They’ve been through this too. Hell, maybe you’ve been through it! Maybe you’ve written something and thought “this is abysmal, who will want to read it?” And I...
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July 7, 2016
Changelings: Friend or Foe?
Changelings occupy quite a prominent role in folklore, and I thought I’d turn my focus to them in this post. Any Google search will throw up different folklore for different nationalities, but for the purposes of space, I’m sticking to the UK. Changelings are beings left behind to replace stolen children. Humans blamed both faeries and trolls for stealing...
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July 4, 2016
How to use where you live to generate ideas
It was the 146th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens this year. While much has been written about his life and work, we can still learn a lot from his methods! His depiction of a supposedly-fictional London was so realistic because he drew from how people lived and worked in Victorian society. Some of this he...
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June 30, 2016
Drake’s Drum: A Hero Slumbers Awaiting His Call
English folklore is crammed with variations on the ‘king in the mountain’ story. In these tales, legendary heroes sleep away the centuries in some remote or hidden place. There’s a version of the Arthurian legends that claims Arthur and his court lie suspended in time beneath Sewingshields Castle. But all of the stories agree that the...
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June 27, 2016
How do you “Write What You Know”?
If you’ve ever read anything about writing, chances are that you’ll have been advised to write what you know. It’s at this point that some writers will throw up their hands and declare that nothing interesting ever happens to them, so what can they possibly write about? It can also lead you into dangerous territory...
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June 25, 2016
Get your free book!
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June 23, 2016
The Folklore of Flowers
Today is the first birthday of the #FolkloreThursday tag on Twitter, so I thought I’d devote this post to my first folklore love – the folklore of flowers! Trees and plants are fascinating at the best of times. They follow their own cycles, often independent of human intervention. They’ll often grow in seemingly inhospitable environments....
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June 20, 2016
3 reasons you might have writer’s block (and what to do about it)
Some writers don’t believe in writer’s block. Writers like Lee Child will liken writing to plumbing. If a plumber can’t turn up to a job and say “Oh I don’t feel like plumbing today” then apparently writers can’t do that either. Bit of a weird comparison. Others are afflicted with writer’s block on a regular basis....
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