Category: writing (Page 15 of 24)

Blank page syndrome?

07/01/2011 / Ellie

I love notebooks. Proper hard-backed ones, Moleskines, gorgeous Italian suede covered journals, even supermarket cheapies as long as they’re pretty. Blank ones, ruled ones, refillable ones, it doesn’t matter.

People know this, and buy me things like that one up there as presents. They’re gorgeous to look at and lovely to handle, and I imagine myself under a cherry tree on a sunny summer’s day, writing in them (with a fountain pen, naturally – I have eight or nine to choose from, including a Parker 51 that’s older than me), and what I write will be beautiful. It can’t be otherwise: on those pages, anything but sheer poetry would be an offence against nature. Continue reading

Editors are evil, and other fairy stories

09/12/2010 / Ellie

It’s hard enough being an unpublished writer, struggling along with the rest of the teeming multitude, trying to get noticed, so why the heck do we make things harder for ourselves by perpetuating myths, misunderstandings and downright untruths about the process of being published?

Hang about in any writer’s community, be it online or in the real world, and sooner or later you will encounter a manifestation of this phenomenon. It happens with the inevitability of Godwin’s Law: just as every Internet argument will devolve into accusations of Nazism, so every place where unpublished writers gather together will throw up one of the following gems. Continue reading