{"id":15458,"date":"2011-06-10T07:23:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-10T11:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2011\/06\/10\/further-thoughts-on-my-writing-future\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:50:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:50:16","slug":"further-thoughts-on-my-writing-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2011\/06\/10\/further-thoughts-on-my-writing-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Further thoughts on my writing future"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our talk yesterday, my editor essentially invited me to reinvent my work however I need to and said she’d support that. It’s a bit like with the novel: I don’t want to have<\/em> to do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want<\/em> to do it — if that makes any sense. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Still, though, it does have me asking some big questions, like “If the issue is not having any audience for my novels, what if I wrote something else entirely?” So, rather than fiction for the next little while, what if I wrote more journalistic, feature-type pieces? Not specifically newsy, factual ones — that doesn’t interest me — but pieces that allowed room for description and exploration — closer, perhaps, to the journal-writing I started out with. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I dunno. It’s just a thought at this point. I don’t want to abandon novels entirely, but it would feel really good to get back to raw writing without filtering it through made-up story, particularly when the fiction element seems to be what’s getting in the way of growing my audience. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Again, I dunno. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Of course, the ideal would be to have so much free time that I could do it all. But I’m kind of liking the idea for now of getting to write about everything around me without having to put that observation all aside and come up with a book about other things — which takes a year or two. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Oh no! Ever since I first visited Carbisdale Castle<\/a>, it’s been my ideal of a place to run away to for a writing retreat. Thinking I might go there next weekend, I did a wee search and discovered that it was badly damaged by last winter’s extreme weather<\/a>, and it’s closed indefinitely for repairs. Drat!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I’ve no desire to get away from my fella, but I do know that I work best when I’ve got long stretches of uninterrupted time, so I’d still like to do this soon. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

My issue with official “writer’s retreat” locations is that there’s something quaintly precious like the chocolatey smell of old book pages about the idea, and with that tends to come a foolishly inflated price-tag. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Any other suggestions? <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I’d love to bring my typewriter somewhere with me, though I realise that means I should really go somewhere where that wouldn’t bug other people!<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our talk yesterday, my editor essentially invited me to reinvent my work however I need to and said she’d support that. It’s a bit like with the novel: I don’t want to have to do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to do it — if that makes any sense. Still, though, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}