Author: harmamae
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The Gap Between Your Ambition and Your Actual Terrible Writing
Everyone who attempts to be creative, and writers not the least, know the feeling of envisioning a super-awesome story or artwork or song. Excitement courses through your veins! This will be a masterpiece! And then… you try to create it. It sounds/looks/is terrible. There’s an enormous gap between what you want to create, and what…
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My NaNoWriMo Update!
I finished my 50 000 novel. Yay! However, I clearly thought I could keep up with my novel and post regularly on this blog as well, and that… didn’t go as smoothly. But here’s a post to remind all you lovely readers that I have not forgotten you. 🙂 I learned quite a few things…
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There’s No Answer To the Question – Why Read?
Still plugging my way through NaNoWriMo (so far on track, by the way, thanks for asking), so it’s another shorter post this week! It follows up nicely to last week’s post on Neil Gaiman’s opinion on the value of reading, actually. Sure, why not fight this argument out some more? We all know reading is…
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Riding the Roller Coaster of Story Plots
Since I’m plugging along through NaNoWriMo at the moment, I thought it’d be appropriate to share this lovely illustration from the New York Times that a friend shared with me. Let’s hope there’s not too many unresolved subplots and plots holes in this manuscript, but hey – I guess that’s all part of NaNoWriMo, huh?
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Neil Gaiman on Reading, Reading Terrible Books, and Libraries
So, at the last moment I decided to sign-up for NaNoWriMo, which will significantly cut in the time I spend writing for this blog. (In theory, at least – I hope I can force myself to churn out terrible writing for a month – sometimes I’m too much of a perfectionist!) Since this is the…
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Let’s Call the Ebook Something Else – It’s Not Really a Book, Anyway
“We need a new word for ‘e-book,’” Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich declare in Slate – basically arguing that process of reading things electronically is so fundamentally different from reading the printed word that they shouldn’t be compared. Well, they do have a point. When I read stuff online, I frequently fall down a rabbit…
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Learn From the Pros – Read Like a Writer (Not A Reader)
When I teach literature I always tell them, these would-be writers (we don’t do workshops, we just read great books), I say, “When you read Pride and Prejudice, don’t if you’re a girl identify with Elizabeth Bennet, if you’re a boy with Darcy. Identify with the author, not with the characters.” All good readers do that…
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Practice Makes Perfect?
No–No, It Really Doesn’t This is what we tell our children. Practice makes perfect. In other words–don’t give up. Keep trying, and the world guarantees you’ll get somewhere. It may not be somewhere great, but it will at least be farther along the path to perfection than you were before. That just isn’t true. I…
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“You Too?” What Friendship Is, and Why It’s So Hard to Find
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’ ” – C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves I’ve always found friendship a tricky thing – I’ve watched other people quickly and easily slide into friendship in a matter of days, and wondered…
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The Book Doesn’t Exist? Then Write It
About time for another Quotable, don’t you think? “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison I once read a book, hated how it ended, and started writing my own sequel. Now, this was when I was in elementary school,…
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