Tag: books
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(Almost) Every Day I Read
(Title appropriated from Hwang Bo-Reum’s essay collection Every Day I Read, which I’m currently wandering through!) How’s it almost the end of January already!! Last year was the year of falling back in love with reading, and we’re fast approaching the time when it’s no longer appropriate for me to talk about it. This time…
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Goal: Improving my Book Openings
New year, new retrospective on my strengths and weaknesses as a writer! In 2024, I made progress with plot, character arcs and incorporating themes into them. I learnt to dial up the environment and characters, and how to merge scenes so that they serve multiple purposes. I focussed on the climactic sequence and the resolution,…
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Writing in the Trenches
I got another rejection yesterday! That’s 3 for this project so far, so they’re trickling in steadily. In the meantime, I’m working on my next book. The scene outlines are almost finished, and I hope to start the zero-draft next week. Yet I am plagued – plagued, I say! – by worries that this one…
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Bound to Succeed Eventually
So that post from last year was a bit of a downer, huh! I was feeling very doom and gloom, dragging my feet from rewrites to edits and staring at the words with empty eyes… Nothing was going to get better, I was never going to be good enough, why bother chasing my dreams? It’s…
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My Favourite Middle-grade Books of 2024
Hello! I meant to post a lot this year, but depression and anemia did a pincer movement and caught me out! So let’s look back at what I read in 2024! I read 8 middle-grade novels this year (so far), so let’s go through them! (No Spoilers.) Nura and the Immortal Palace by M.T. Khan…
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Doomed to Fail Over and Over
Hello there! After finishing the first draft of my current book project (Code Name: No Footings) at the end of March, I took a break of a month in order to reset, work on fun projects and get the story out of my head. Then I picked up the draft at the start of May,…
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My Favourite Book of 2023
(TL;DR: it’s What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama, translated into English by Alison Watts.) I keep a spreadsheet of the books I finish reading every year, with each entry scored out of twenty in a system-less vibe-based way. I also take extensive notes on things like plot, characterisation and…
Non Hughes 