welcome to my forest of self doubt, time to ignore it by hanging out with family and reading a good book!!!!!

wondering if I could make my currently “starts quiet” book “louder” just by removing a subplot and compressing from 100 to 80k… it might be too late for this one but maybe next book

anyway I have 2.5 more books to read before I can start reoutlining my gothic, please wish me luck as I attempt to write something along marketable lines 🥲

also I’m wondering if this compression up front is similarly reflected in compression during act 3 but I need to think about it more

that’s wiiiiillllld. I gotta watch it and see

like I haven’t seen the recent REBECCA movie adaptation but do you think there’s a version of that screenplay out there that starts with the narrator and Max entering Manderley for the first time

well and I’m also thinking about changing genres to genres that better suit what feels right to me, but that’s an overlapping issue, not the same one

and because I spent SO long training myself to understand these formulae, because I was bad at plot, I’m now facing a hidebound plotting process that doesn’t actually reflect market conditions 🥲 lmao

Anyway it’s a good reminder that the sort of conventional screenwriting tip of “setup happens between 1 and 20-something percent” doesn’t necessarily always apply to a manuscript because in narrative, beats can overlap, come in and out of one another, or come out of order

like I wonder if Tananarive Due’s THE GOOD HOUSE would have been edited differently, with more compression, had it been released this year. I can’t say for sure but it’s something I’m sitting with

a lot of really effective compression going on recently. something I need to learn from.

and it’s not like the setup is GONE in more recent books I’ve read, it’s more like the intensity of the opening is upped, then dips as we reenter setup mode. More scenes are doing double or triple duty too

reading a lot of older books in a row is bringing home that in recent books I’ve read, the inciting incident is much closer to if not *on* the first page, or we’re in media res with a related problem if it’s not the inciting incident proper. these older books have all this gorgeous setup

“Po” as shorthand for poetry but all I can envision is the red teletubby

from the last 5 years is tougher, but I still remember cryin like a wee bab at the end of OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA

favourites from the last couple months: REBECCA by Daphne du maurier and NEVER LET ME GO by kazuo Ishiguro

Oooooooo 👀👀👀👀👀

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

Thyme Travellers 2 An anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction

The #kickstarter for Thyme Travellers 2 An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction is now live! #projectwelove @kickstarter.com www.kickstarter.com/projects/158...

In less than two weeks, Kaleidotrope will re-open to fiction and poetry submissions for one week. April 19-25. One of only three weeks the zine will be open this year!

(the way the hearing in one ear or the other will cut out at random and then slowly seep back in… I forgot to add that shit in)

When you break out in a cold sweat realizing that you didn’t add one tiny specific characteristic of your disability to your representation of a character in your novel

I have absolutely nothing to do today, hell yes

I love cooking for people and having family over and I’m GOOD at it, it just also takes it out of me x) good to balance hosting with visiting

I did it I survived the harrowing ordeal of domesticity once again

this year I am learning that for me, successfully managing and cooking an Easter dinner involves a 20-minute lie-down every couple of hours

Mercutio From Sunday Times bestselling author of The Embroidered Book and The Valkyrie comes an opulent 13th century epic retelling of the life of Mercutio before he ever encountered Romeo and Juliet. On the b...

Thank you! My next novel, Mercutio, is out in about a month. The favourite of my books so far, a medieval novel imagining Mercutio's adventures in Faerie before he met Romeo, Umberto Eco meets Susanna Clarke. It's out in ebook and audio everywhere May 7, but print release dates differ by territory.

a single cloud,
greater in size than any building I will ever have seen,
yet made and unmade in a day

hearing a radio ad with the tagline “find your possible”, followed by an ad about support for kidney disease, reads very differently after just finishing NEVER LET ME GO

still thinking about him (the plucky captain who wants to be pirate king)