Hmm…

Category: On Writing

  • The Gap Between Your Ambition and Your Actual Terrible Writing

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    harmamae
    in

    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…

  • Riding the Roller Coaster of Story Plots

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    by

    harmamae
    in ,

    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?

  • Let’s Call the Ebook Something Else – It’s Not Really a Book, Anyway

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    harmamae
    in ,

    “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…

  • Practice Makes Perfect?

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    harmamae
    in

    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…

  • Against Grammar – and Other Rules of English

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    harmamae
    in

    “Why can’t the English learn to speak?” –         Henry Higgins, from My Fair Lady  I’ve been scaring all my friends lately by ranting on about grammar and how much I hate it. They come to me with concerned looks and say, “But doesn’t grammar help you understand what other people are saying?” And I tell…

  • Abusing Punctuation: The Ellipses…

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    by

    harmamae
    in

    I am reminded by my readers that I have been negligent in posting this summer–I blame it on a parade of weddings, the likes of which I have never experienced before–but you all still deserve my sincerest apologies. I hope a post on a Wednesday alleviates some of my blame.  Recently I came across an…

  • Is the Paperback Really Dying?

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    harmamae
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    Maybe It Isn’t E-books are taking over and traditional publishing is dying, or so the current narrative goes. E-book sales are going by leaps and bounds – apparently 2011’s sales were double that of 2010’s- and this clearly doesn’t bode well for the sales of cheap paperbacks. Readers might shell out for nice hardcovers if…

  • Writers Who Don’t Publish Must Be Crazy, They Say

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    harmamae
    in

    On Authors Who Don’t Publish They’re making a movie about J.D. Salinger – a man known for publishing The Catcher in the Rye, and then nothing else. Or, more excitingly, a man known for writing The Catcher In the Rye, a few short stories, and then reportedly a treasure-trove of unpublished works that could possibly…

  • The Pleasures of Not Writing

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    by

    harmamae
    in ,

    “The pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again” —John Updike. This quote grabbed me because it is something I’ve been struggling with a lot lately – I’ve managed to keep writing a fair amount, but each step is a momentous struggle of motivation.…

  • What, the English Language Changes? Literally?

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    harmamae
    in

    First, a somewhat related note – check out my story ‘One House, Six Decades – Three Generations’ on the new CBC Hyperlocal site. The CBC, our venerable old Canadian broadcaster (for those of you who aren’t Canadian and didn’t know), wanted stories of change from Canadians across the country – change in people and places,…