Okay, I want to talk about something in particular this week. Only, in order to do that, I need to make confession before we go any further. Are you ready? This isn’t going to be easy for me.
Here goes nothing…
There really is no surface quite as slippery as the blank page. Which is not great when you consider we’re completely surrounded by them at this time of year. There are blank calendars wherever we look, showing all those unwritten days we’re going to fill, whether we like it or not. I hate any new calendar or diary for that. They always seem to offer undiscovered territory. Yours to claim. They’re a map of potential, in that moment you open them, at least. Of course, once you finally start using them, all you really mark down are trips to the dentist and occasional family gatherings.
Read MoreIt won’t be a long one this week. It can’t be. It’s been a long week. It’s been a tough week. Last Saturday, after spending a thoroughly brilliant day at a wedding, Sam and I got back to our hotel and logged online to find out one of our closest friends had died.
Read MoreAnother plateau. Sorry, folks. I normally like to come here with something planned, but I got distracted by my new short story this morning. I sat down with a plan of changes I wanted to make to the current draft and totally forgot about I had this blog to tackle first. True, it’s a rod I made for my own back, but I’m no quitter. I can figure this out. I just probably shouldn’t be doing that in front of you. You’re going to need to bear with me. This week has pretty much reduced to me to doing all my thinking out loud.
Read MoreMy apologies, it’s going to be a fast big of blogging this week. Which is annoying, as there’s a really a lot I should be talking about. I could talk about going to my first night of live readings on Monday and the wonderfully odd index of authors I met there. Let alone something strange I picked up about the mechanics of live storytelling and recital. I could talk about the fact I’ve been off work all week and I’ve spent a lot of that time wrestling with final rewrite of my second novel. Which, for the record, can either be going really well or really badly depending on which way the wind’s blowing.
Read MoreHere at The Blank Page, we like to try and keep our offerings to a fairly high standard. Sadly, this is yet another week which found your erstwhile blogger stuck in the middle of some self-inflicted existential crisis. He’s got a lot on his mind at the moment, so he’s locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of a rum, a bread and butter pudding and some old Spawn comics. We figured it’s probably best to leave him there until he drinks himself out cold. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. He’s not getting any younger.
Read MoreWell, this is troubling. I sat down with plenty of ideas for the weekly blog, but none of them are working. Every single one of them died after a paragraph or two in. Some were too lightweight to be worth your time. Others were just too dark and brooding to be read by anyone outside my own head. One in particular was too angry to live.
Read MoreFor the record, I’ve been struggling to express this idea since it hit me. This felt like a good place to thrash it out. Show my workings. I think that, whilst sometimes we will buy what we need, there is a more interesting relationship between us and buying what we want. I think, in some cases, what we’re actually chasing after is already in our head.
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