Writers’ Bloc is proud to announce its nominations for this year’s Dzanc Books Best of the Web.
Written by Vaughan Simons
Is this why you can’t look me
in the face when you’re (writing
about) slitting my throat?
In Process on 7 July, 2009
- A fevered dialogue. Internal. A fevered dialogue. Let’s go external. Let’s go ballistic. Go.
- Yes, it all makes sense now. It all makes sense. Crystal. Stab me with your pen to make sure that it’ll all resound with the same perfect but unquantifiable clarity when I’ve got a fraying chasm in the centre of my chest, will you? Stab me repeatedly. I’ll need a bigger hole, not just some glancing flesh wound. You’re not trying hard enough, damn you.
Chris Killen interrupted the
writing of his second novel to
answer these very trivial
questions: oh, the guilt
In Interviews on 27 April, 2009
Things I know about Chris Killen, then. He was born in 1981. He lives in Manchester. The Bird Room, which was published earlier this year, is his first novel. I know these facts because all the very short biographies of Chris Killen mention them.
If all else fails, you can still write
In Reasons on 5 April, 2009Question: when someone suggests that you should write for a living, is the most appropriate response always to blush and feel extremely flattered?
Answer: no.
The semi-colon: sex
in punctuation form
In Process on 28 February, 2009
Ladies and gentlemen, pray be upstanding — and then recumbent in sheer, panting orgasmic lust — for the semi-colon: the most misunderstood, underused and under-appreciated ‘member’ (cough) of the punctuation canon. Forget your full stop, cast aside your comma and shove your colon up your ass, because it is time for us to examine why the semi-colon should be the recipient of both our heartfelt hosannas and our wanton, salivating desire.
It starts with a blank sheet
In Process on 18 February, 2009This site — like paper or, more often these days, like the document one is presented when booting up a standard word processing package — is white. Very white. I sometimes wonder if that’s my first mistake in the act of writing. The sheer, unadulterated whiteness I place before myself.
Nothing is original
In Web stimulus on 17 February, 2009Nothing. There’s nothing original. So I might as well give up now. Goodbye.
That’s what I often end up mumbling to myself, usually an hour or so after I’ve finished writing something new, once the initial elated feeling that it was the most powerful piece of prose ever committed to pixels has dissipated, to be replaced by the awful realisation that someone, somewhere, probably did it all before. And did it far better, too.