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» TMO Talk » Life » The thread in which john loses at life (Page 9)

 
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Author Topic: The thread in which john loses at life
ben

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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
I'm not sure I agree with your suggestion that a writer has some duty to read up on the best and brightest of what's gone before. If I was being provocative, I could say the time you seem to spend reading other people's books, from some sense of responsibility, is an avoidance strategy to keep you away from the harder business of writing your own stuff.

Ouch! Well, guilty as charged m'lud. Other displacement activities I wish to have taken into account include: making yet another cup of tea, "only" watching Spooks, Heroes and Screenwipe because they're the "only" things worth watching on TV and "only" spending four hours on YouTube because I simply must see yet another compilation of credit sequences.

Perhaps Mart nailed it better with his dance music analogy - in approaching a genre, how can you extend or subvert the conventions if you're only hazily aware of where the established boundaries currently lie? There did seem to be a touch of condescension in your attitude to the crime genre based on a - by your own admission - pretty limited reading list. Even if your choice of genre is based on marketing or tactical rather than artistic considerations, surely it's good sense to get an idea of what other work is being done in the field and how a non-formula talent can still find a very fruitful place in a crowded marketplace.

David Peace - Damned Utd and Red Riding quartet 'fame' - has built himself quite a following over the past decade, published by Serpent's Tail; Pelecanos, I might have thought you'd know of as he's worked as a writer and story editor on The Wire as well as publishing multi-generational epics of crime and corruption in Washington DC. Stark is author of the 'Walker' books, the most famous of which was filmed as Point Blank, with Lee Marvin. I don't think any of these are particularly obscure and I'm in no sense a crime buff, but it surely can't hurt to have some general sense of what's 'out there'?

Harmful or pointless some of my reading may be, I find it hard to believe that I'd be able to turn out a half-way relevant contemporary novel having nothing more recent than a couple of volumes of PG Wodehouse stories and, maybe, Lucky Jim.

[ 30.10.2007, 10:51: Message edited by: ben ]

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wonderstarr
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quote:
Originally posted by ben:
Ouch! Well, guilty as charged m'lud. Other displacement activities I wish to have taken into account include: making yet another cup of tea, "only" watching Spooks, Heroes and Screenwipe because they're the "only" things worth watching on TV and "only" spending four hours on YouTube because I simply must see yet another compilation of credit sequences.



Believe me, I've not only been there, I am there. I've achieved fuck-all today except watching Supergirl, some of it on fast-forward.

quote:


Perhaps Mart nailed it better with his dance music analogy - in approaching a genre, how can you extend or subvert the conventions if you're only hazily aware of where the established boundaries currently lie?



I'm not sure if it's necessary to extend or subvert the conventions. But then, I'm not really trying to "approach the genre". I'm trying to market the story and character I want to write, in a way I think agents and in turn publishers will be able to get a grip on. I wouldn't really say I was trying to do something with the crime genre, except in a broader way that includes, as I suggested, comic book vigilantes and the culture of grime. It would be hard to explain without getting wanky about my specific novel, and maybe sounding shit when I try to put it in words, and then making me feel why am I bothering, this sounds rubbish and if it sounds so poncey when I explain it to Ben and Thorn, I've clearly got no chance with professionals.


quote:

There did seem to be a touch of condescension in your attitude to the crime genre based on a - by your own admission - pretty limited reading list. Even if your choice of genre is based on marketing or tactical rather than artistic considerations, surely it's good sense to get an idea of what other work is being done in the field and how a non-formula talent can still find a very fruitful place in a crowded marketplace.



Sort of, but I'm hoping that by coming from a slightly sideways position, in that the "crime" I like is diverse stuff like Batman, Reacher and Clockers, I'm not going to be tempted to appropriate what seem like marketable, mainstream conventions, tricks and templates. I don't know... could be entirely wrong. But there is that syndrome whereby loads of young filmmakers over the last ten years basically offered a poor-man's-Tarantino showreel as their calling-card. I think there is a benefit to coming from left-field -- a freshness, again to risk sounding wanky.

quote:
Pelecanos, I might have thought you'd know of as he's worked as a writer and story editor on The Wire as well as publishing multi-genrational epics of crime and corruption in Washington DC.


Thank you for these references -- I agree, I certainly am pretty ignorant of what seem some obvious sources.


quote:
Harmful or pointless some of my reading may be, I find it hard to believe that I'd be able to turn out a half-way relevant contemporary novel having nothing more recent than a couple of volumes of PG Wodehouse stories and, maybe, Lucky Jim.
B-but... surely what makes a contemporary novel "relevant" isn't knowing about other novels! The relevance of your work surely comes from a connection with ... "life", culture, society, lived experience, humanity, recognisable emotional situations and responses, I don't know. Not how well you've engaged with and how closely you've studied a reading list of Booker runners-up from 1997 onwards.

[ 30.10.2007, 11:01: Message edited by: wonderstarr ]

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pudgy little saucepot

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Ringo

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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
I've achieved fuck-all today except watching Supergirl, some of it on fast-forward.

The rest in slow motion?

Anyway, JohnJ, did you dump that chick yet?

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ben

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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
B-but... surely what makes a contemporary novel "relevant" isn't knowing about other novels! The relevance of your work surely comes from a connection with ... "life", culture, society, lived experience, humanity, recognisable emotional situations and responses, I don't know. Not how well you've engaged with and how closely you've studied a reading list of Booker runners-up from 1997 onwards.

I would have thought I could do both, surely? I might not go on about it but I really work hard at the whole 'lived experience' bit. I've been up in a glider and swum with the dolphins - next year I hope to do a bungee jump. TO THE EXTREME!
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wonderstarr
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I just don't think "relevance" in your own writing necessarily (or at all? I don't know) comes from what you've read. You seemed maybe to be implying that if you'd only read Wodehouse and Lucky Jim, you'd be likely to turn out some kind of pip-pip upper-class folly of a novel, maybe with some comedy knockabout bourgeois thrown in.

It's so hard not to sound wanky, isn't it, but I think what writing should aim for, more than relevance to contemporary literature, is some kind of emotional truth.

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pudgy little saucepot

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Jimmy Big Nuts
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quote:
Originally posted by ben:
I would have thought I could do both, surely? I might not go on about it but I really work hard at the whole 'lived experience' bit. I've been up in a glider and swum with the dolphins - next year I hope to do a bungee jump. TO THE EXTREME!

have you got a blue peter presenter as the protagonist of your book?

[ 30.10.2007, 11:44: Message edited by: Jimmy Big Nuts ]

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wonderstarr
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I dunno, maybe "emotional truth" just sounds like a trump card, and is actually bullshit.

My post above sounded quite a lot like the repulsive author in The Information -- the Welsh one who's all "unctuous" with his missus. Glytth or something. Ben will know... I don't have time for these "books" by... Morten Amis senior, or whoever!

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pudgy little saucepot

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Tilde
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TO THE EXTREME!

...is making me pull stupid difficult to explain smile faces at my desk, ben you bastard.

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dang65
it's all the rage
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quote:
Originally posted by ben:
I've been up in a glider and swum with the dolphins

Hey, I'm as willing to suspend disbelief as anyone, but I'm having a hard time understanding how the dolphins stayed in the air.
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Jimmy Big Nuts
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christ on a bike, dang.
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mart
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They just floated back down to earth, Dang, following the glider.
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ben

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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
I just don't think "relevance" in your own writing necessarily (or at all? I don't know) comes from what you've read. You seemed maybe to be implying that if you'd only read Wodehouse and Lucky Jim, you'd be likely to turn out some kind of pip-pip upper-class folly of a novel, maybe with some comedy knockabout bourgeois thrown in.

I was tilting at a non-genre equivalent of Chesterton and Conan Doyle in terms of wider reading feeding into writing (or not). It just seems a little odd to be pitching your work as 'crime', at least to the publishers, when that doesn't seem to be where your passion lies.

A sense of what's relevant comes, surely, from a blend of personal experience, the 'news' and what your peers are up to. Your peers might be your own irl friends or, equally, they could be other writers, with whom you can spend 8-10 hours or 300 pages in close psychic contact. Aside from anything else, the latter can offer insights into how you marshall your material into a distinctive shape and order - hints on form, as well as content, which you're hardly likely to pick up from other sources.

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wonderstarr
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quote:
Originally posted by ben:
I was tilting at a non-genre equivalent of Chesterton and Conan Doyle in terms of wider reading feeding into writing (or not). It just seems a little odd to be pitching your work as 'crime', at least to the publishers, when that doesn't seem to be where your passion lies.



I wonder if Price would say his passion is the crime genre, though. I suspect he'd say he was interested in people's stories firstly, with crime just as a kind of crisis in people's lives, making them collide with each other or knocking them off course in interesting ways. There are murder-mysteries at the heart of his great novels but I don't think he's primarily interested in police procedural. He is interested in community, and spoken slang, and people put in extreme situations, things like that.


quote:

A sense of what's relevant comes, surely, from a blend of personal experience, the 'news' and what your peers are up to. Your peers might be your own irl friends or, equally, they could be other writers, with whom you can spend 8-10 hours or 300 pages in close psychic contact.



You really consider the authors of the novels you're reading to be your peers, akin to your irl friends? I don't see it that way myself. And really... the news? Some of the worst novels I've read try to reflect news stories. I'm sure it can be done well, as well as horrifically, but I think trying to make a novel "relevant" by building topical issues into it is a frankenstein recipe. If the stuff you want to write about chimes with particular cultural hot topics, then that's lucky in terms of marketing and I think it's canny to play it up, but deliberately trying to make a story relevant through paying attention to the daily papers seems topsy-turvy to me. Again, I feel what makes a novel satisfying and worthwhile is involvement in storytelling, and emotional connection with characters.

You seem to be suggesting that finding up what, say, McEwan is up to by communing with your literary mate through his books is a way of tapping into themes of contemporary relevance. Ah, Ian's still interested in the nature of constructing literary texts... that's obviously something the novel of the late noughties must engage with! (I offer a gross parody of course)

quote:

Aside from anything else, the latter can offer insights into how you marshall your material into a distinctive shape and order - hints on form, as well as content, which you're hardly likely to pick up from other sources.

I agree re. form and technique. But not so much theme and content.

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pudgy little saucepot

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ben

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quote:
Originally posted by jnhoj:
it becomes very hard to analyse your own actions when everytime you think you've done something wrong you can just say "well she gave me a black eye" so it's not very healthy.

I just hope the guy I met at the postoffice won't mind me staying there a couple of nights.

Fuck knows how we're going to untangle this house we've rented.

I don't know - she sounds a bit like Betty Blue. If she's as hott as Betty Blue you maybe ought to hang on for a little longer, at least until she does something really fucking crazy that you can put in a novel.
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wonderstarr
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Maybe I was a bit too scathing about the news. I read an interesting item today about a gun murder apparently being closer to resolution through a YouTube comment, which was going to go in my NOTES FOR BOOK 2 document if I hadn't got fucking sidetracked with this discussion.

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pudgy little saucepot

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wonderstarr
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Having thought about it, I'd even go so far as to say I was WRONG with what I said about the news. As long as the story isn't shoehorned into "topicality" by forcing it to fit some burning current issues. The whole culture of postcode gang shootings is something that informs my writing, or my writing plans, at the moment.

But it's not as if someone writing about that should be passionate about crime, again, or the crime genre. Crime is what sets the balls in motion.

I thought of another perhaps comparable case study for Ben. Comic book fans moan that Heroes' Tim Kring makes a big deal out of never having read a comic book. They think that's arrogant and condescending. But to him, superpowers are the way in to telling stories about characters pushed into extreme (and therefore interesting) situations.

In my parallel, Ben... YOU'RE THE WHINY COMIC BOOK FAN. Is that what you want.

[ 30.10.2007, 13:15: Message edited by: wonderstarr ]

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pudgy little saucepot

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Thorn Davis

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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
I included some totally arrogant pitch about how the genre of my novel was Jack Reacher busting onto a David Lodge campus, how the style was Martin Amis and Iain Banks before they got old, how the tone was Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons if they grew a pair of balls between them.


When I was pitching my book a while back I struggled to write anything about it that didn't sound like an apology for its existence. I think you should maybe send out a couple of letters using the description, just to test the water. Just give it a go, like. Just to see.
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wonderstarr
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quote:
Originally posted by Thorn Davis:
[QUOTE]When I was pitching my book a while back I struggled to write anything about it that didn't sound like an apology for its existence. I think you should maybe send out a couple of letters using the description, just to test the water. Just give it a go, like. Just to see.

I know you're probably just trying to kill off the competition here, but it's already gone out like that to the agent who liked my previous work and told me this novel would be "The One!"

She hasn't written back yet. Which could be... oh dear. Or, you never know.

I know what you mean though. I cringe far less over the pitch above than I do over the memory of a cover letter I sent in the early 90s, which included the fucking snivelling line "my novel aspires to the style of John Updike, though of course I don't pretend I am anywhere near his league." File under W for WASTEMAN.

Here's a final mildly amusing thing. You remember my ex-mate who used to post on here... can't remember his name on this site, anyway the antisocial beat poet one. He was called Artery elsewhere. I had to chuck him 18 months back when his behaviour became really unacceptable, but he sent me an abusive mail under a false name recently to link me to a site showing he'd had a book of poems published.

All well and good, and an achievement even if he is a 50 year-old tosspot who sleeps with a bunch of Croydon single mums behind his family's back.

But he'd clearly written his own blurb, and unfortunately it reflected the fact that, just as I (unwisely) introduced him to the internet around 2002, so I introduced him to consoles around 2005.

"If [Artery] was a games machine, he'd be a PlayStation 2."

This in 2007. I mean, it's a bit... it's basically saying you're the thing that came before the latest thing, and is now out of date.

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pudgy little saucepot

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ben

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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
I thought of another perhaps comparable case study for Ben. Comic book fans moan that Heroes' Tim Kring makes a big deal out of never having read a comic book. They think that's arrogant and condescending. But to him, superpowers are the way in to telling stories about characters pushed into extreme (and therefore interesting) situations.

Ach that would explain the aura of rather-too-pleased-with-itselfness that clings to Heroes, even though it's essentially going over similar ground to X-Men and not doing anything remotely as interesting as Watchmen?

Anyway, I managed 700 words last night rather than watching an episode of Spooks that D acclaimed as "yeah, not bad" - a glittering endorsement last awarded to the Klaxons album.

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wonderstarr
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Ben, could you post a list of your current "influences"? I would be interested.

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pudgy little saucepot

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MiscellaneousFiles

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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
"If [Artery] was a games machine, he'd be a PlayStation 2."

This in 2007. I mean, it's a bit... it's basically saying you're the thing that came before the latest thing, and is now out of date.

To look at it another way, perhaps he was saying that despite his aged appearance, he's acheived an unprecidented level of worldwide success in his field.

Or not.

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ben

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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
Ben, could you post a list of your current "influences"? I would be interested.

What a pretentious thing to do!

Here you go:
  • The SCUM Manifesto
  • I Am Legend
  • 'Tax-shelter'-era Cronenberg (The Brood, Videodrome etc.)
  • Time of the Wolf and The Road
  • Ted Hughes (esp. 'Crow')
  • Arcade Fire (esp. 'Window sill')
  • The 9/11 Commission Report
  • Adam Curtis / The Power of Nightmares
  • The Origin of Species

It sounds like a bit of a pig's breakfast, doesn't it? Still. Everyone has to start somewhere.

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wonderstarr
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Well, writing novels is inherently pretentious, isn't it -- but listing influences is what kids in bands do, so I think it's "OK" [Smile]

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wonderstarr
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Good to see you are into The Crow Road.

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pudgy little saucepot

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Ringo

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Your pretentious booke talke has killed TMO. I hope you're happy.
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Jimmy Big Nuts
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quote:
Originally posted by wonderstarr:
Well, writing novels is inherently pretentious

Depends on your motivation. Entertaining without requesting that the audience should have to adapt to your requirements and expectations will remove most of the inherent pretention. Aiming to please without assuming ownership of specialist knowledge, and without teaching or analysing from a challenging, philosophical perspective.

[ 31.10.2007, 08:20: Message edited by: Jimmy Big Nuts ]

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Jimmy Big Nuts
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or not! Lol, anything goes, right? [Smile]
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ralph

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I aked my wife's friend (26, recently published for the first time) what approach she took to writing her first novel. She said I just sat down and wrote what was in my head.
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Jimmy Big Nuts
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It's wearying isn't it.
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ben

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quote:
Originally posted by Jimmy Big Nuts:
Depends on your motivation.

True enough. Dan Brown could be described as an unpretentious writer par excellence and has reaped the benefits accordingly.

Much of the fiction I read goes out of its way to challenge or disturb and is probably the result of someone with a swollen ego taking risks and getting away with it (at least 51% of the time). The process of writing, I've found, is a bit of a hash-up between instinct and using techniques borrowed from writers I admire - the intended effect on the reader is to get her to the point where she can't bear to read on but is unable to stop herself (a fairly intense reaction and hard to sustain over many pages without a lot of the pacing problems that, I reckon, are going to be the hardest thing for me to resolve).

I'm trying to discard anything that impedes the generation of this reaction and add in anything that further intensifies it. Playing around with structure or style is as much to do with finding what works - targeting the reptile brain or subconscious or however you want to describe it - as it is about finding my own 'voice' which, a third of the way through, has yet to really rise off of the page.

[ 31.10.2007, 09:26: Message edited by: ben ]

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ben

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So, yeah - sorry for killing the forum, Ringo. [Frown]
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mart
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Rillion (I've just remembered his name)
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wonderstarr
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Oh yeah [Smile]

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pudgy little saucepot

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My Name Is Joe
That's Mister Minge to you..
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National novel writing month starts today. The idea is to write at least 50,000 words by November 30. Forget editing, forget quality, just write, get it down on paper.

Could you write 1700 words a day, every day for month? Of course you could, you've all done it on this thread!

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Black Mask

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NAME YOUR INFLUENCES (on your current fiction)

  • H. P. Lovecraft
  • Sax Rohmer
  • Jean-Patrick Manchette
  • W. H. Hodgson
  • Herge
  • Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Peter Lorre


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sweet

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