Monday, April 30, 2012

Forgotten Experiment

I've just discovered blogger's new statistics and analysis (I say new, I have no idea how long it's been available) and I discovered the answer to a forgotten experiment from November 2007.

Back then I was posting a short story most Fridays and one week, as an experiment, I based the story on several keywords that were trending that week, a story called Let Me Entertain You.

I now find that that post has had as many hits as the second and third most popular posts on my site combined, five times more hits than any of my other stories and twenty times more than the average post. I think the experiment worked.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Unhelpful Writing Advice

I recently dreamt I was giving writing advice to some people and awoke with 2 bits of almost-plausible sounding advice in my head:

1. Don't allow your character to remain inactive for more than 2 hours.

2. Always write death scenes in the morning when you have more emotional energy to put into them.

After posting about this on a writing group I'm in, Helena Bell was inspired to blog about The Greatest Writing Advice in the Entire World. Take a look - it's brilliant.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Eastercon 2012

As usual I was just at EasterCon for the Saturday, and this year spent most of the time in the dealer hall helping out and standing in at the TTA Press stand with Roy Grey, wandering round, chatting and drinking tea.

I met lots of people I've spoken to before at other cons, plus a whole selection of new people who wandered past the stall or who were manning other stands. In vaguely chronological order:

Martin McGrath, Ian Whates, Tony Lee, Gareth Powell, Chris Priest, Nina Allen, David Tallerman, Aliette De Bodard, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Damien Walter, Ian Sales, Terry Jackman, Mike Cobley, John Meaney, Charles Stross and probably many others. So many others went past in the crowd too...