Irish literary bursary awards clinic

Ireland offers bursaries to artists of varying walks of life. Last night I went to a clinic on Writing Your Bursary, which had some interesting information, like, they had €867K worth of applicants last year and were able to fund about €80K’s worth of them. o.O I’m not clear on whether that was for the full year or for each half of the year, but I think it was for the full year. They have somewhere around 150 applicants per funding period and fund about 15 of them. There were…

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I did not go Into the Woods

Today I did not go Into the Woods, despite the great temptation to do so. I have to say, without having seen it, I cannot help but feel that it was a terrible mistake to split the role of the Wolf and Prince Charming between two actors, since part of the point is the metaness of Charming also being the Wolf. The tiny bit I’ve seen of Depp as the Wolf in the trailers does nothing to convince me that my feeling is a wrong one. Anyway, I’ll see it…

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look, i wrote a book

I have, a year late and after half a dozen false starts and tens of thousands of words thrown away, finally finished the 3rd book in the quartet I’m writing for my nephew. It is, I am pretty confident, utter shit, but Christ, at least it’s finished. That’s…three, I think. Books I’ve written this year. STONE’S THROE, which will be out–soon! January, maybe, for Kickstarter backers? March or April for everybody else? BEWITCHING BENEDICT, the Regency we’re shopping around, and now SKYMASTER. Also I have written pretty nearly half of…

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end media blackout

At least, a theoretical end to the media blackout. I should probably carry on with it to a fair degree, because it was pretty successful. I think I got around 40K written in September, maybe as much as 50, including all the synopsizing and stuff I did for the epic proposal. It made a dent, anyway, in my to-do list, and I’m considerably less freaked out than I was at the beginning of September. The epic proposal isn’t quite done, although that had been my hope. The bulk of the…

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a week of work

With the arrival of September and the start of (pre)school, I have gotten more work done in the past week than in the past three months combined. There’s a cafe in the same building as my son’s preschool, so I’ve been dropping him off, walking thirty meters to order a cup of berry tea, and sitting down to write for close to 3 hours. It’s a godsend. On the second morning, the barista said, dubiously, “Do you *like* the berry tea?” and I cheerfully admitted it was about the only…

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