August 4, 2011
I'm back! I hadn't planned on taking a two month break from my blog, but real life has a way of intervening.
One of our bichons, Sophie, had an operation on her luxating patella (trick knee) and refused to stay in a crate (who can blame her?). This meant she needed constant watching. Just as I thought I was catching up, my computer succumbed to senile dementia - the poor thing's over 10 years old and simply can't cope any more.
Cue Nick and Eric of Apple Online Store coming to the rescue with a wonderful new mac. Not only did Nick talk my husband, Tony, and I through the best package for us, but it turns out he's a big SF and Fantasy fan. He asked me who my favourite authors were and, to my shame, practically every name flew out of my head until after I'd put the phone down. I could have said Marge Piercy, Ursula Le Guin, Stephen Donaldson, Garry Kilworth, Terry Pratchett and lots more, but I went completely blank, so I'm making up for it now with this. Nick showed a genuine interest in my work and looked some of it up on the web. He's asked to see more of it and I shall oblige. After he's put me back in touch with the whole worldwide web, it's the least I can do.
Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
June 6, 2011
Have you ever tried googling yourself?
The first time I tried it was after a bad day and I thought it might cheer me up. It did. I discovered that I'd been shortlisted in a competition and came across a couple of reviews of my stories. The next time, I found two of my poems that I had sent to a magazine without getting a response had been published, and someone had used a mini story of mine on their blog without my permission. The mini story, titled 'Stone, Scissors, Paper', was about t...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
June 1, 2011
Even in the most frustrating weeks there are things to savour. Last week it was winning the Slingink Shorts 2011 competition. The anthology will be titled after my entry, 'Communication' and it will also contain my two other entries, 'Still' and 'Combat'. Of course, there'll be lots more to read in it too. I'll post the details as soon as I get them, or you can read the top three entries online at www.slingink.com.
The competition's run annually for mini stories of 140 words plus a one wo...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Competitions
May 14, 2011
It's strange how seeing your story in print can change the way you feel about it. Maybe it's the influence of the other stories around it, maybe it's something to do with how it's illustrated. You begin to see how other people might interpret it, and that might not be the way you intended. According to reader-response theory, no text is complete until it's been read, and then only for that reading, so seeing work in a different context is bound to change it.
Bearing this in mind, I read th...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : FantasyFiction
May 2, 2011
I'd been trying to find ways of describing the sunny weather, struggling to find fresh metaphors and to recreate how it felt to experience spring. Then I remembered one hot summer's day last year when I kept cool by reading Ernest Shackleton's account of his ill-fated Antarctic expedition, South. He used little figurative language. He simply told the tale, and somehow that simplicity was more moving than any number of adjectives. Without endless metaphors or descriptions of how it felt - ...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration
April 25, 2011
I once heard of someone who had lost a whole year's work - poetry, short stories, essays - everything. It had been in exercise books and notepads left in a rucksack in a car parked outside the writer's new house when he was moving in. Thieves broke into the car and stole the rucksack. The writing was of no value to them, and would no doubt have been dumped, but he never found it.
I can't imagine how awful such a loss would be. Rewriting everything exactly as it had been would be impo...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
April 17, 2011
When it comes to tweeting, I'm a novice. I first started looking at Twitter a few months ago, and was impressed by how many really inventive and literary tweeters there are out there - and how prolific they are! So far, I'm following Gayle Beveridge, Simon Sylvester, Nanoism, and Henry Leland (Olde Yeller Cat), and the list is growing all the time.
This week I was thrilled not only to gain a new follower, but to be retweeted for the first time. The tweet was an extract from one of the so...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration
April 11, 2011
I've been torn in several directions today. It's been beautifully sunny spring weather, and I would have loved to just lounge around outside, but I really needed at least to make a start on clearing the weeds in the garden to prove that there are actually some flowers in the borders, and then there was this blog to write. I still had two library books to read that had to be returned this week as well. Who could really blame me if I sat in the garden and read? The answer is: no one except ...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
April 3, 2011
... and that I need to put a space between words. I'm going to quit now before I get anything else wrong.
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
April 3, 2011
Why is it that you can proof read something umpteen times, yet as soon as it's irrevocably published a typo jumps out at you? I do, of course know that 'i' comes before 'e'except after 'c', so why didn't I type it that way in my last blog?
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
