I read Jay's blog from yesterday and I thoroughly enjoyed his bonus content where he posted a video of him reading a chapter of his latest work in progress. (I really loved that one of the characters shared my name.)
Anyway, I loved it so much...that I did the same thing.
It's a fundamental truth in writing that if you read your prose and dialogue aloud, you will hear errors your eyes miss. It'll also help your character to sound more natural.
So, here you go: me reading a random chapter (actually the latest) of my current manuscript. And I'd like to challenge our fellow writers to do the same.
I seem to remember that Her Cheating Heart was commissioned by Spinetingler Magazine although I can't remember what the reason was - - it was a special series of stories they were running that had to be around 1k words. Anyway, they asked and I delivered. It was a mood piece, really, and the the running joke behind my writing it was that there is no better soundtrack to murder than country music; all those broken hearts and dead flowers are just too good to waste.
Anyway, I've been meaning to record the story for a while now, so we set up a camera and did a quick and dirty shoot. I won't tell you whose room that is or why they have a Steve McQueen poster festooned with lights. But if this works, I might start thinking about doing more direct to camera pieces. Maybe actual posts and ramblings replete with my face in your monitor.
As of writing this, The Death of Ronnie Sweets (the collection this comes from) is free in Kindle. I think once this post goes live you'll have one more day of free and then its up to 77p or free to borrow for Prime Members (whatever that means). I love the stories in the collection. I love the character of Sam Bryson, who was a fore-runner to J McNee (the protagonist of my first three novels). I hope that you might, too. And I apologise profusely for the pimping.
Bit of an unforseen circumstances this week chez McLean. Some watery madness from above (ie, a freak rainstorm) has got Russel involved in clearing water and fixing drains. So he's barely even realised that Friday is rolling around.
So he'll fill in time this week, presenting to you the most realistic depiction of the author-agent/editor dynamic ever committed to theatre...
And also (via Mitchell and Webb) a scene Russel finds quite familiar. Not from working with anyone in recent years, but he did once, or maybe not once, deal with, or maybe not deal with, a editor similar - or totally different - to this one. Or not.
