Wednesday 11 June 2008

Thanks and writing essentials

Many thanks to the blog-friends whose wise, kind and compassionate comments have helped me out of the ‘what the hell am I doing being a writer when people are starving in the world?’ crisis of confidence/conscience. Believe it I say that your comments made a big difference.

Many thanks, too, now I’m feeling a better (helped by passing the 200 page mark in the wip Mk 2 today) to Stuck in a Book for alerting me to Litopia, the Writers’ Colony which has a weekly and – as from this week – a daily podcast on all things writerly.

I’m still getting to grips with it but it seems to be trans-Atlantic by which I mean that contributors from both side of the pond are included in both colony and podcast. I listened to a discussion on one of the podcasts I’d downloaded and definitely came away with the impression that, of the ‘round table’ contributors to the discussion, one at least was sitting at a table on a different side of the Atlantic from most of the rest. And the rest – for all I know – were sitting at their kitchen tables doing it all by the wonders of modern technology.

Their aim, especially with the ‘litopia daily’ podcast is to become as essential to a writer’s day as the morning cup of coffee. I’m going to give it a go for a bit and see how it pans out. I don’t drink coffee in the morning but if it becomes as essential as my wake-up cup of tea, then I’m all for it!

3 comments:

no said...

Hey Alis - I just finished reading The End of Mr Y. Weird and unsatisfying, and trying too hard to be clever, I'd say. But I do like the black-edged pages

Kat W said...

Hi Alis - thanks for the link. The site looks interesting; I've never seen anything like it for writers before.

Glad you're feeling better today.

Kat :-)

Alis said...

Hi Aliya. Yes, weird and unsatisfying would about sum it up, I think. For me, it just couldn't decide what kind of book it was trying to be. That's why I didn't review it in the end - I couldn't be sufficiently enthusiastic about it.