A Private View

November 1, 2011
Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to the private view of artist Pauline Wood's latest exhibition in Northampton.  I love her work - it really sparks the imagination.  I've found it hard to keep up with all the weird and wonderful ideas it's inspired since.

Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration 

 

Good News

November 1, 2011
I've had two pieces of good news in one week.  Bridge House Press has accepted my story, 'Heavy Air' for its science fiction anthology due out in March 2012, and my entry in the Brighton Cow competition, The Architecture of Hate' has been short-listed and selected for broadcast on Brighton hospital radio.  As good things are supposed to come in threes, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Competitions 

 

Playing Truant

October 20, 2011
I've often seen advice in publications for authors, that the best way to be productive and to avoid writer's block is to establish a routine for writing.  Set aside a regular time slot, preferably daily - even if it's only for ten minutes or so.  If you're struggling for ideas, write about anything that comes into your head - but here's where I see a problem.  If you're so bound by routine, where's the room for new ideas to enter your life or for creative thought?
I recently broke with routin...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration 

 

How to Get Noticed

August 29, 2011
The best way to promote your work could be to get it featured on BBC's Radio 4.  Recently a spokesperson for Dickens Journals Online (DJO) was on a programme telling the presenter about the organisation's project to get text copies of Households Words and All Year Round online in time for Charles Dickens's bicentenary next January.  Facsimiles of the originals had been scanned using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but sometimes words were misread or paragraphs were jumbled, so every issu...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.

 

Thanks

August 4, 2011
I'm back!  I hadn't planned on taking a two month break from my blog, but real life has a way of intervening.
One of our bichons, Sophie, had an operation on her luxating patella (trick knee) and refused to stay in a crate (who can blame her?).  This meant she needed constant watching.  Just as I thought I was catching up, my computer succumbed to senile dementia - the poor thing's over 10 years old and simply can't cope any more.
Cue Nick and Eric of Apple Online Store coming to the rescue w...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.

 

Google-eyed

June 6, 2011
Have you ever tried googling yourself?  
The first time I tried it was after a bad day and I thought it might cheer me up.  It did.  I discovered that I'd been shortlisted in a competition and came across a couple of reviews of my stories.  The next time, I found two of my poems that I had sent to a magazine without getting a response had been published, and someone had used a mini story of mine on their blog without my permission.  The mini story, titled 'Stone, Scissors, Paper', was about t...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.

 

Good News

June 1, 2011
Even in the most frustrating weeks there are things to savour.  Last week it was winning the Slingink Shorts 2011 competition.  The anthology will be titled after my entry, 'Communication' and it will also contain my two other entries, 'Still' and 'Combat'.  Of course, there'll be lots more to read in it too.  I'll post the details as soon as I get them, or you can read the top three entries online at www.slingink.com.
The competition's run annually for mini stories of 140 words plus a one wo...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Competitions 

 

Magic

May 14, 2011
It's strange how seeing your story in print can change the way you feel about it.  Maybe it's the influence of the other stories around it, maybe it's something to do with how it's illustrated.  You begin to see how other people might interpret it, and that might not be the way you intended.  According to reader-response theory, no text is complete until it's been read, and then only for that reading, so seeing work in a different context is bound to change it.
Bearing this in mind, I read th...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : FantasyFiction 

 

Less Is More

May 2, 2011
I'd been trying to find ways of describing the sunny weather, struggling to find fresh metaphors and to recreate how it felt to experience spring.  Then I remembered one hot summer's day last year when I kept cool by reading Ernest Shackleton's account of his ill-fated Antarctic expedition, South.  He used little figurative language.  He simply told the tale, and somehow that simplicity was more moving than any number of adjectives.  Without endless metaphors or descriptions of how it felt - ...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration 

 

Don't Do As I Do...

April 25, 2011
I once heard of someone who had lost a whole year's work - poetry, short stories, essays - everything.  It had been in exercise books and notepads left in a rucksack in a car parked outside the writer's new house when he was moving in.  Thieves broke into the car and stole the rucksack.  The writing was of no value to them, and would no doubt have been dumped, but he never found it.  
    I can't imagine how awful such a loss would be.  Rewriting everything exactly as it had been would be impo...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.

 
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About Me


My writing career began as a freelance feature writer for the local press, businesses and organisations. Now a prize-winning playwright and short story writer, my work has appeared in numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic. I write as K. S. Dearsley because it saves having to keep repeating my forename, and specialise in fantasy and other speculative genres.

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