Hey, Internet, it’s good to be back amongst you. After a couple of chaotic weeks and some incredibly painful days without any sort of signal that belongs in the 21st century, The Blank Page is up and running again. I’d call it 2.0, but let’s not fool ourselves. We’re in for more of the same here. The overly long posts and occasional reveries that don’t quite add up to a bigger pay cheque. Still, that’s hardly the attitude to start on. The Longs have moved finally moved house. Let’s begin there.
Read MoreThe house move that's been consuming our live since we started looking at locations back in March has finally locked into place. Over the space of a rapid Tuesday afternoon we went from feeling like we were never going to actually move to finding out it was happening in a week’s time. It was pretty dizzying. A happy flavour of panic.
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 MoreI’ve been writing stories, in one form or another, since I was about six or seven. It’s hard to be sure exactly when I started. It’s all become a bit of a blur thanks to, well, getting old. I know I was definitely small enough that older relatives thought it was adorable. I guess it was at the age where it’s socially acceptable to patronise a child for trying to do something you associate with grown-ups.
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 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 MoreNo matter who you are, the odds are pretty good that a teacher left a mark on you. Of course, for my parents’ generation that could mean something very different. Their teachers didn’t just use chalk and blackboards to educate them. Oh no, they employed some very different instruments.
Not that we’re here to discuss the failings of our parents’ teachers. Nope, we’re here to talk about a few things, which would really annoy one of my old teachers. She certainly left a mark on me.
Back then, I’d only just started writing and self-publishing horror stories. I’d finished a few: The Low Road, The Narrow Doors and The Compressionist, but I was still finding my feet. At first, I didn’t even think about trying to make a story out of my nightmare. If I’m being honest, I just wanted it out of my brain.
It was only after a shower and a mug of coffee, that I realised I had to try and do something with it. I was trying to be a horror writer. It would be a shame to waste the fear jangling through my system. So, instead of distracting myself, I sat down and began to work with it.