Brendan Peveril . net

I have a place where I can type things and imagine that many people will read it. Of course, I can also look at the site stats and see that… nobody reads it. It’s like I’m writing this in a diary hidden under my pillow, really. Following are bits of news related mostly to this site.

Here’s something cool. Neil Gaiman’s story How To Talk To Girls At Parties is available both as text and audio here. Gold if you’re too cheap/poor to buy the book it’s in right now, like me.

Work rolls on with A Deeper Shade of Gone and Hallowed. Shamus is working away at that first page, but apparently he’s having a few problems. I’ll post it as I get it. Hallowed is still in script form, but I’m getting closer and closer to the point that I’m ready to start aggressively seeking and artist so I can get a treatment out. Any artists who stumble across this should get in touch with me if they’re interested in taking a look. There will be much blasphemy.

I’m looking at a new short story too. It’s a solid idea, it straddles genres, it’s staying in my head; all of the good things. Now, one way to learn to write good stories is to read good stories, but there’s a problem with that for a beginning writer. To sell a story, Hell, just to get someone to read a story, even if they get it for free, you need to hook them with a killer beginning. I can read good stories by other writers until my eyes bleed, but most of them will be by writers already established as good. Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Theodore Sturgeon, they just don’t need as strong a hook as I do. I’ll read the whole story no matter how weak the beginning is, because I know it’s good. If I find a story by an unknown, though, I’ll not bother to finish it if the beginning is weak, because chances are that the whole thing is.

I’ve got a killer story, with a compelling narrative, a delicious twist, and a startling twist on the twist (which I hesitate to call a meta-twist, it’s more like a re-twist), but no fucking hook.

Anyway, I’m dangerously close to turning this into a lecture on literary theory, and nobody enjoys that. I’m out.