Rewriting is like emergency surgery: you lay the mangled body out and prod it, limb by limb, trying to decide what can be salvaged and what needs to be amputated...
Spare parts
Category: Pariah
My second Frank Sampson story, originally published by Random House and now self-published
Another teenage wizard!
I’m a slow, messy writer. Ideas get jammed into the narrative, then hacked bloodily out. But Mortal does at least deal with the most important question left hanging over by the previous books: how, at the tender age of five, Frank came to kill his father…
The first sentence, part 2: Pariah
Any sorcerer will tell you: once there’s a demon in the room, all bets are off
The crap read
It’s the read-through where you realise that this book is a complete and utter disaster and nobody in their right mind could possibly get even to the bottom of the first page…
Fuckin’ up
The process of writing — at least as I practise it — is one of continual failure, and of the subsequent failure of all attempts to remedy that initial failure.
A monster rewrite
Like Frankenstein’s monster, it will shamble to its feet and start to move in a sinister fashion… until it falls over a chair
Donald Hounam 