Day 321 of #ayearofwriting and exciting news, new story, published today in Mechanics’ Institute Review. Find out more here https://andrewoldhamsboneyard.wordpress.com/?p=3634
Day 322 of #ayearofwriting and I am seeing how the whole story is like a dance. It takes time to perfect. Thankfully, I type better than I dance. I write better than I move.
Day 323 of #ayearofwriting and sometimes you can hear the distant click of closing door in the story. Maybe it’s because we now have doors after several years of open plan whistling. Or, maybe Ms Hayashida has had her say.
Day 324 of #ayearofwriting and it is sometimes hard to get a balance between your everyday job that pays the bills and the writing. Many writers and poets had to do this, sometimes to the detriment of the work and in a few cases to escape the everyday. I am a disabled writer, this means during the day I have only a limited amount of energy – something that we refer to in our house as spoons – that…See more
Day 325 of #ayearofwriting and I am reading the work of Octavia Butler. I am mainly reading the short stories, many of which deal with being an outsider or coming to terms with being with outsiders. Sometimes, as in Bloodchild, how we come to an arrangement with our new environment and that fascinates me. Will we come to an arrangement with climate change? Will it be one that draws on our tribal past or will we learn to go beyond the violence?
Day 326 of #ayearofwriting and I am reading through Ms Hayashida and cutting, and cutting, and cutting. The art of cutting is to make sure the ribbon still stays whole throughout the story and doesn’t fray, or worse, snap.
Day 327 of #ayearofwriting so I have been thinking, ‘How do you write about climate change without it becoming a thriller or Hollywood doomsday plot?’ We have been talking about greenhouses gases for 100 years but nothing has changed, why? Then I came across this https://youtu.be/oXOu-dezdKo
Day 328 of #ayearofwriting that moment when you realise that the Ms Hayashida story has elements of erotica in it. Chop chop, pervert. I blame Anais Nin.
Day 329 of #ayearofwriting and my office screen is going in. Private spaces are important to writers.
Day 330 of #ayearofwriting and I am transfixed by the idea of kodama that flows beside hibakusha in my story. The spirit and the disabled, the ghost and the those pinned to the earth. That’s what disabled is to me, I cannot run, jump or do anything that would land me a wheelchair again. Gravity and G Force is my enemy. I move through the water but drag through the air and soil.
Andrew Oldham's Boneyard 