Hunting Nazis – Commentary on writing the story
I've written a short story titled Hunting Nazis for the End of Module Assessment (EMA) for A215 Creative Writing. The target word count was 2,500 with an upper limit of +10%. The first draft weighed in at 5k words, double the target length. However some of this was because although I plotted it I needed to tell myself the story in the first draft. Once I got to the end it was much easier to re-edit and take out some of it. Hunting Nazis The central premise is that Reggie and Dot (from the earlier story Planting the Past) have been hunting down nazis guilty of war crimes against the members of the French resistance and SOE agents supporting the network that they were both part of during World War Two. The story takes place in Berlin in 1953 when they are tying…
Still here
I've not been able to post much for the last couple of weeks, I had a bout of cellulitis in my left leg which knocked me out for a few days, followed by lots of antibiotics. On top of that I've been spending what time I have for writing on the end of module assessment (EMA) for the creative writing course. This time it is back to fiction rather than continuing with poetry, because fiction is what I want to write (the poetry has been fun and interesting and it takes lots of craft, but I find writing stories more interesting). So far I'm 5,000 words in to a 2,750 word short story. So there needs to be lots of editing done (which I'm sure will be fine, there is lots of detail and dialogue that I can pare down now…
Fire in the Night
This was the view from my bedroom window when I woke up this morning, there had been a large house fire a few doors down in the middle of the night. Six fire engines, a turntable ladder, command and incident support units on the green this morning (Photo credit: James Kemp) From speaking to neighbours and some of the Surrey Fire & Rescue Service crews and local Councillors (lots of which was via Twitter) I found out some of what happened, no doubt there is more to it than this. Sometime around 03:40 the fire started in the upstairs part of a semi-detached house at the other end of the green from my house. The exact time is unclear, but Surrey FRS reported that they were on the scene at 03:47. The man who lives in the house, a local mechanic…
Geek Poetry – New Poetry Genre?
So for TMA5 of A215 I've chosen the poetry option and written a three poem sequence provisionally titled 'Castles in the Cloud' which is some very geeky poetry about cyber security. This is fine and it works for me, even if the other folk on the course are pretty much English Lit folk who aren't geeks. That makes getting feedback hard, but not impossible. What I am struggling with is the other part of the assignment which is to research suitable publications that I could potentially submit the poetry too. There is a fair list of general poetry magazines at which is good enough for the purpose of the assignment. However I wanted to find the sort of place that would appreciate both the language and the underlying geekery of the work. My Google fu has deserted me on this,…
Radio Silence
I thought I'd just post a short note explaining why I've not written much over the last fortnight. Some of this is the fact that work has been very busy and I've been working longer than normal hours from the beginning of April. This used up the spare articles I've written as well as the time to write more. The writing time I have had has been used to write some poetry for TMA5 of A215 (Creative Writing). This is due next week, so is likely to continue to consume writing time. When that's done I have TMA1 for B120 (Intro to Business Studies) due a week later followed by the End of Module Assessment (EMA) for A215 which is worth 50% of the marks. So its likely to be early June before a normal three times a week service…