The Canadian publishing arm of the Harper Collins publishing company have a program called FirstLook, which lets you sign up to look at ARE (Advanced Reading Editions) of various new books before they are published.
This program includes books in a variety of categories including fiction. You can view the ARE books and review them. I’ve […]
Old Window - Collaborative Fiction Series
16 Feb
Posted by Raj Dash as Fiction, Collaborative fiction
The Internet allows humans to communicate in ways that were not formerly possible. One exercise that I’ve always wanted to try is collaborative fiction. Upon scanning my writing journal, I came across a few fragments of fiction from Jul 2003 that show a bit of promise in the mystery, horror, or slipstream genre. It’s rough […]
As Angelo got on the bus, he realized his mistake. But he’d been so thirsty, had gulped down gallons of water like a diabetic. And now he couldn’t hold back any longer. He was about to burst. It had been a while since he’d let loose. But he was out in public, on a bus. […]
Shortly after sunrise, Constable Bill McDearmotte is already on the beat. I see him from a distance, about four blocks from here. He should be resting, taking his deserved time off. But he’s so dedicated that he doesn’t seem to know when to quit. I can hear his standard-issue police shoes beating the pavement, even […]
Here’s an entry from my writing journal from Mar 3, 2003, slightly edited for publication:
I’m not doing too badly, compared to my output rate yesterday. I’m close to 2000 words in just over three hours. That’s about 537 words per hour. This is slightly less that the average of 553 words/hr that I had hoped […]
During the months of Jan - Mar 2002, I set a goal of writing at least 5000 words daily of something. What I did was chart my daily word count, then averaged it out on a sliding window of 7 days. What I found was that I couldn’t always reach 5000 words, and not all […]
Writing full-time as a career requires strong discipline. Every writer knows this, but it’s easier to think that you’ll meet the writer agent or editor somehow by magic. The boring fact is that you have to do your writing like a project. Each piece of writing is a different project. Imagine that each “project” has […]
The problem with having an active imagination like mine is that if you don’t employ some discipline, it is so very easy to come up with hundreds of story ideas. The time it will take you to note these ideas and plot them basically dissolves any actual writing time. To avoid this kind of problem, […]
This site is a journal documenting fiction-writing techniques. As well, I’ll be presenting a selection of mostly short fiction that I’ve written over the years.
For those of you that would like to re-publish some of my writing, here are the general rules. You can reuse my articles without my permission, provided that you retain my […]
