9:15pm, 23rd August 2016
It took me an embarassingly long time to work this out: conflict is everything.
Do you know what happened to the first story I wrote once I worked it out? When I first focused on deliberately working it into every paragraph? It won WotF.
If you only ever take one piece of advice from me, take this: you need more conflict.
TAGS: Anatomy of a Golden Pen, wotf32
5:00pm, 23rd May 2016
Being a writer, I'm full of self-importance and arrogantly believe everyone wants to read pages and pages of nonsense from me. As such, I'm going to start a series about my Golden Pen story from Writers of the Future volume 32, Squalor & Sympathy, dissecting it from various angles.
First up: all the historical accuracies and references in the story.
TAGS: Anatomy of a Golden Pen, wotf32
Matt Dovey is a professional writer of short science fiction & fantasy. He is very tall, very British, and probably drinking a cup of tea right now. His surname rhymes with “Dopey”, but any other similarities to the dwarf are purely coincidental. More →
There weren't no good way to say Colin, mate, this is shit, you don't deserve it, but we bloody love you and we'll get through it, alright? Cos no matter how you said it his head was too full of angry buzzing to hear it.
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"You look like shit."
I cleaned myself up in the room and rinsed my mouth with some whisky from the mini-bar, but I obviously show signs of the afternoon.
"Like you care."
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Complaints that consent given under the influence of gin is not consent are patently ludicrous. Any man capable of signing his name to the papers clearly possesses sufficient of his faculties to understand his decision.
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