Ross Young's Blog, page 48

Nanowrimo – you’d be a fool to miss it!

I’m staring down the barrel of a 3 month writing drought forced upon me by circumstances that aren’t entirely against my will, but are not what I expected. I’ve picked up sticks and moved to a new country with a new job and all that comes with it, which has set me back a little bit. Fortunately for me Nanowrimo is just around the corner and having participated for several years now I’m looking forward to getting the kick I need to get back into things. I’ve said before that I don’t worry much...

Death is a wonderful character

I’m a big fan of death. Not in the psychopathic or, uh, necrophiliac kind of way thanks. It says more about you than me that you even went there. No, I’m a fan of Death as a person, a character.

The sad loss of Terry Pratchett brought something into focus to me recently. I’m a big discworld fan, it’s quite apparent in my own writing and nowhere more so than in the personification of death itself. Pratchett’s Death is a phenomenal character full of depth and the dark humor that appeals to my p...

Door Number Four (52)

“Homologous?” Jack said.

“It’s an insult, you people from the other side are all the same in appearance, it’s a ridiculous slur.” Mr Grey said turning his rocky visage to look at the two others in the room.

“I shouldn’t be here.” Justice said standing to leave.

Jack stood up at the same time. “No, I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be in this goddamn place at all. I have been nothing but polite to you people and I’m sure that I owe my thanks to those who took me out of that hole in the ground b...

Editing 101 – Repeating yourself? Find out!

“I say good chap you’re repeating yourself! Were you drunk when you wrote this? Poor show!”

Do you repeat phrases without being aware of it? It can have a huge impact on your writing. An eagle eyed reader will not miss the fact that you’ve said the same thing three or four times in a novel, fantastic if you intended it, embarrassing if it was a clever turn of phrase you’ve flogged like the dead horse you rode in on (What?).

A novel, as previously mentioned, is not easy to check over for this...

Editing 101 – No more -ly’s

One of the key pieces of advice often given to writers is to cut down on your use of ‘-ly’ words. They tend to slow pace and add to your word count. A good way to gauge the necessity of these words is to delete them and see if it makes any difference. They’re pretty superfluous most of the time and tend to bulk out writing. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be used at all, just sparingly.

A quick example –

John pulled the stupendously heavy gun from his massively shiny holster rapidly and poin...

Publishers block – a little introspective.

I had the pleasure of reaching the end of a work in progress today. Writers like me (so people with quite clear issues) can occasionally suffer from the opposite of writers block. The result of this is an outporing of blathering fiction that leaves us with a nasty tangled mess of loose ends, plot holes, and inconsistent character actions. Sadly, in this instance, I really quite like what I’ve produced for the simple reason that it makes me laugh. It’s not the most coherent thing I’ve ever wri...

Flirting with failure

Having launched Dead Heads, and failed to grasp the finer points of marketing, or essentially selling a book,I’ve reached the conclusion that I’m out of my depth. Dead Heads is cleaning edited, had good reviews, and it’s not something that ‘should’ drown in what I consider to be a never ending quagmire of repetitive generic fiction spawn from people’s efforts to mimic the most recent YA best-seller turned hollywood blockbuster, or erotic copy-cat fiction. I guess bitterness is settling in qui...

Door Number Four (51)

They hurtled along the motorway swerving between bugs. Ted covered his head with his wings whenever they came close to clashing with the carapace of another bug but Amanda barely noticed. Things were going wrong. Blackbeard was high up in the police it wasn’t like them to send someone of his talents to investigate a common homicide, particularly not out in the sticks. They shouldn’t have even found the body for weeks, if ever.

She was over the relationship, it had really only amounted to a c...

Door Number Four (50)

He told her how he had walked into the wrong elevator and found himself in an office that didn’t make sense. Then he explained how he went home and found his best friend was a huge bear who still had the dexterity to beat him at most video games.

Then Jack had to explain his trip to town, how the pie woman had tried to, well he didn’t know what she’d been trying. Running through town, escaping from the police, and then being buried alive.

She stopped him when he reached the point of having hi...

Door Number Four (49)

“Why are you out here in the middle of the countryside?” Amanda asked.

Blackbeard smiled. “I could ask you exactly the same thing.”

“I’m here on business.” She said.

The beard bristled and Amanda watched as the mouth twitched. “You know our officers found the strangest thing this morning. A dead citizen in his own home. Murdered, it would seem, by someone carrying a pistol. If I recall correctly the first time we met you were carrying a pistol, do you still have it?”

“No, it was lost, recentl...