image

Snips

Short odds and sods

Auditioning my next novel

I have been working on my novel ROSALIND for more years than I care to admit. There have been shaky times – several complete rewrites come to mind. And som...

Signs you might be a story geek

I noticed that Go Into The Story reposted an index of the excellent series of posts on Aristotle’s Poetics from 2013, and it occurred to me that I should d...

Words we should ration #1: Skitter

Sometimes a word is just too good not to use. It sounds out with a lovely onomatopoeic resonance and conjures the perfect image in the reader’s imagination. ...

Welcome to the Under Blog

Happy Friday from Inflatable Press. Although we are in a seemingly endless set up mode I have decided to start adding content as a kind of rolling dress r...

Three types of story

Despite having written a few and studied many more, I don’t think I’ve ever really come to grips with the grammar of the short story. It may be partly due to...

Bzzzt – decloaking

So there was this Creative Writing MA. Actually there was that MA, and then there was this MA. What I did. Two in a row, for complicated reasons. And I loved...

Your leased future

I mentioned a while back that I’ll be folding my Bookshape blog into this one over the coming weeks. This is my first new Bookshape post. Two articles about...

Day jobs and writing

Well, it’s been a month since my ten days of blogging. Am I rested? Well not really, because I’ve spent the time catching up with all sorts of writing and da...

Day 10 (Day 10)

It’s day 10 of my solo Back to Blogging Challenge. Whew. As soon as you commit to something it’s guaranteed that everything else in your life will go crazy....

Friday check in (Day 9)

Today I hit a writing wall. It’s not so much a block as a realisation that I could go on indefinitely in my current direction because I like to describe the ...

Just generally checking in (Day 5)

No article or story for today’s Back to Blogging challenge post. More of a check in, really. It’s hot here in the UK, and various freelance issues overtook ...

Outlining on the mind

I love the way the internet ripples. I’m not sure if a post on a topic in one blog prompts another, or a mysterious primal force drives people to discuss the...

New blog: Book Shape

Given how often I’ve been posting here recently, I’m sure you can understand my need to start a new blog. In fact the reasons for the new blog and for my com...

Am I back?

Ahem. Should have been writing today. Did a bit of surfing. So anyway. Here are some of the things I’ve been reading today (a lot of them courtesy of Poets ...

Flash fiction: Action Required

Over at Terribleminds Chuck Wendig laid down a flash fiction challenge inspired by Occupy Writers: a 1000 word story on corporate abuse – any genre. Mine was...

A little twitter catch up

I’ve been a tad slack on the Twitter front recently, but I like to keep a record of good writing links around. I still mine my old link round up articles w...

Welcome to the new Inflatable Ink

Well it’s taken me two years, but I’ve finally got round to moving Inflatable Ink from its temporary home on Blogger to its own Wordpress theme. I have nothi...

Time for some platform building

I’ve always had a difficult time with networking and marketing. I’m at my happiest building websites, and applications and stories, and at my worst put...

Some Flashback Thoughts

When I describe a plot I tend to talk about a succession of events. Something happens first. And then something else happens. A character works to achie...

Where’s Inflatable?

In case you’re were wondering, Inflatable Ink is not dead. It’s just pining for the fjords very very quiet right now. In fact I’m working on a new ver...

Booookalanche!

I have been preparing for something of a new start recently, and what better way to mark that than getting the study painted? When it...

Il faut cultiver son jardin

If I can be Candide with you… If you wondered what’s been happening chez inflatable over the last three weeks or so (is it really that long? apparently so)....

An exercise in voice

Here’s an exercise courtesy of the Introduction to Playwriting course that will probably be powering many of my posts in the coming weeks. This is best under...

Ask it twice (in transit)

I’m somewhere over the Atlantic as I write this, near Reykjavik in fact. Which I guess shows that I do occasionally work on planes, even though the passenger...

Conflicted about editing

I’ve been working to combine various drafts into a single good one over the last few weeks, and I’ve found myself strangely reluctant to use old work. ...

Links and pondering hiatus

We went absent last week, sorry. Various real world events intervened in unavoidable and unforeseeable ways. As they do. Speaking of which, I’m on my o...

Skeletal links, late and tweety

Steph was hit by flu-like symptoms this weekend, so we had to skip our usual roundup. Sorry and all that, and get well soon Steph! The round up should be ba...

REPOST: Embrace Your Inner Zombie

This week I’m reposting some favourite Inflatable Ink pieces from the last year or so. At a workshop recently the discussion turned, as it does, to our p...

REPOST: The ten minute writer

This week I’m reposting some favourite Inflatable Ink pieces from the last year or so. For some reason, the prospect of writing often fills me with mi...

Seasonal Links

These are seasonal links insofar as we’re in the festive season, and they’re links. We’re talking links in the season, not links of the season. Not that I’m...

Remember me? Here are some links

Hello Internet. It’s me, Matt. I’ve been off for a while battling deadlines and other nasties. Steph is in Spain and wearing a t-shirt. A t-shirt! Outside! ...

Links: No More NaNo!

So. Finally it’s over. Yay. Heartfelt congratulations to all the winners, heartfelt commiserations to all the rest, and praise be to God that there are nearl...

The Backlash

And so everyone gets together and has big rolling party. A party in which the weirdest ideas become indistinguishable from truth. A party where the shifting ...

Magical thinking

The other day, I read Hilary Mantel’s diary of the time she spent in hospital fighting a life-threatening illness. That she was ill and in hospital is factua...

No links friday

Steph has had a difficult week of it, what with NaNo kicking off and various other trials — I’m sure she’ll bring you up to date on Tuesday next week, when s...

Vaguely Italian

I’m writing this from Rome, though when it will see the light of day is another matter. No doubt I’ll be somewhere else then. Maybe America. (UPDATE: yes, Am...

15 influences

This weekend, friend-of-inflatable Cheryl Ossola tagged me on Facebook. That makes me sound very social-networky, I realize, but there you are, that’s what h...

Keeping on

I have been climbing back out from a very bad week.  Someone killed my cat, just ran him over and never stopped. We were out looking for him ...

New Inflatable Ink schedule

I’ve been hinting at a few changes around here for a while now, and this is the week for it! We’re introducing three (count ’em.. three!) new weekly features...

In Cumbria/The Do-Over

In Cumbria, UK having come via NYC, Philadelphia, Manchester, which is my excuse for the quiet around here. I’m missing America dreadfully already, but...

Nail Your Novel review

I’ve been promising for a while to review Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris. With Christmas here I’ve actually found some time to catch up on a few of my promise...

Round up from the Grand Canyon

I have been in Las Vegas and at the Grand Canyon this week, so I’m late and sparse once again. Still, I managed to fit in some reading around my travel...

The lost post

I’m mourning a lost post. I’m in unlovely Las Vegas amidst the cigarette smoke and dead-eyed slot machine addicts. After an hour looking in vain for a ...

The round up, revised

This week I go mad for revision. First drafts are so last month! I drop in on Pratchett’s process and find him playing with orcs. I check out the 20 be...

A late round up

With NaNoWriMo just finished and a mountain of catch up still under way, the round up has been a little squeezed. Still, here’s a short check in on som...

Whew, Well that’s Done Then

I wrote 8000 words in two days. Two days that included driving from LA to San Francisco, and eight hours paying work. I finally made my weary way to the f...

Round Up from Behind

This week I’ve gone bad.  I rail against bad blog conventions, and then refute my own point with a link to an excellent post that breaks my rules. Go m...

A Hostile Round Up

With half the writing community currently engaged in wordcount battles, there’s an appropriately combative note to this week’s round up. The structure ...

NaPoMoNoWriMo: Going Postmodern

Apparently there are some people out there are trying to write a novel in a month. Since they’re engaged in a project called National Novel Writing Mon...

Round Up Redux

This week NaNoWriMo just won’t stop being a thing people talk about, so I join in and pimp my own NaNoRelated offering. Finishing stuff turns out to be...

Round Up the Usual Suspects

More on editing and unediting the dead this week. How to maintain tension even when your cell phone makes everything too easy. A man gets his hair cut ...

NaNoReMo

There has been much excited gushing in the blogs recently about NanoWriMo. I did not realize until recently the extent to which NaNo has become a kind ...

Editing Big then Small

When I’m editing, I often get caught up in the nasty details of my writing. I’ll be reading through a paragraph and I’ll notice that I have fallen rep...

Deja Review

I may not have posted anything else since my last round up, but that didn’t stop me grazing the literary ruminations the internet has to offer. Which I guess...

A very long round up

I’ve been keeping an eye on bookish and writer-oriented sites for a while with a view to a weekly round up. This week, I’m kicking off with a bumper post, co...

Discipline and publish

I try to use most of the practices I have been researching and writing about here, at least until they hit the ‘it’s not for me’ pile. So it makes sense to d...

Theme and Foreshadowing

I attended a workshop last night. Every two weeks this group gets together to analyse two or three chapters submitted by members of the group. As usual...

Embrace your Inner Zombie

At a workshop recently the discussion turned, as it does, to our productivity. One participant bemoaned her own output. She needed to be in the right m...

Hello! How do you do?

This my the eleventh post. Now, according to the arbitrary rules I have set myself, I am allowed to say some things about this blog and about myself. F...