My short book How to Get Writing…Fast, is being released for Kindle on 1 October. You can pre-order it on Amazon right now. Translating the perfect concept you hold in your imagination to the imperfect words of the printed page is way harder than it looks. This short book is designed as a quick-start overview … More Get Writing Fast – cover reveal!
Last week I made a flippant comment on Facebook about the kinetic energy a marshmallow would have were it accelerated to lightspeed. I knew it would be giganormous. Needless to say, being a bit of a geek, I then had to go and figure out exactly what it was. First, though, a few words of … More What happens when you’re hit by a marshmallow moving at light speed
There is a lot to be said for ‘found art’ – something true for writers too. Let me explain. I once heard a wonderful story about the time Rick Wakeman – then keyboard player for Yes – was sufficiently unimpressed by the artwork for their 1978 album Yes Tor that he hurled a tomato at … More The joys of ‘found art’ for writers
One of the obscure English words I’ve discovered is sipe. It’s a noun, and it means the channel in the tread of a tyre. Your challenge? Write a sentence (or two) in the comments using this word. Copyright © Matthew Wright 2016
One of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read is Stanislaw Lem’s The Invincible. It’s short, sharp and deals with fundamental questions of humanity and the nature of the human condition, versus machines. Where will our technology – and our arrogance about the powers it gives us – lead us? It’s one of those deep-concept things … More Invincibly lost in translation
There are over a million words in English. Most of them are quite obscure and deserve better attention than they get. This week’s is stylometry. It’s the statistical analysis of literary style. It’s thanks to stylometry, for instance, that we know William Shakespeare’s plays weren’t written by him, but by another William Shakespeare who lived … More The obscure word of the week is stylometry
While fossicking through the books I have in the back shed the other week I found my copy of Gavin McLean’s Whare Raupo, the official history of New Zealand’s oldest publishers, Reed New Zealand. They are no more, alas – vanishing in 2007 when parent company Elsevier sold their worldwide publishing interests to the Pearson … More What a publisher’s official history has to say about meeeeeeee
