It’s been a busy old month at Chez Beckford. Between projects and challenges and the daily grind, it’s been hard to find a moment to sit down and record it all, but things are finally starting to slow down, so here’s a quick roundup of what’s been happening. Running for MS research I mentioned in…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person who cohabits with a dog must certainly want to go running with her. I mean, it seemed like the logical idea at the time. I want to run every day in May to raise money for the International Multiple Sclerosis Fund. I live with a dog…
Tempus fugit to the max! I could hardly believe my eyes when I looked at the date of my last post and saw it was somewhere back in the foggy beginnings of March. Has it really been six weeks since I went to London? Surely not! There is something rather odd about how time moves…
I feel it as soon as I step off the train and walk out of the terminal onto Euston Street – a sense of calm, a feeling of coming home. There’s this thing about London that never changes. Buildings come and go, as do the people, but the city’s soul is constant. I’ve popped over…
There are two things one learns when inviting a Podenco into their lives. One is that they are part Husky, the other is that they are part Limpet Crab. You will never go to the bathroom alone again. You will also never be in any doubt about their needs and wants, especially the wants. Lucy…
It’s been a hot minute, but here we are, back to the basics of good old fashioned blog writing. No matter how many fancy new platforms I try, I always end up back at this place. Back on my self-hosted, self-controlled website; back to the roots of what words mean to me. Last year in…
I decided to take a couple of weeks away from the blog, not from a lack of ideas, but from a need to sit and think about some big concepts and feelings I am having about my work and about creativity in general. So, instead of finding words to describe all of these thoughts, I…
Over the past year, though, I have noticed a change. Call it a personal maturation, or a solidifying of something. I find I no longer feel the same joy of discovery in throwing everything at a page in a creative frenzy. I want to slow down. I want to finesse. I want to hone my technique. So, I have started to taking life drawing and portrait classes.
The fictional world in which a story takes place matters. If the world is not believable then the story will lose power and the reader will lose interest. Writers call this suspension of disbelief. You can have the craziest stuff going on in your story, but if something about the world in which it is set is off, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
It’s fair to say I have pretty eclectic tastes. To be a good writer, it’s important to read widely so that that I have a broad range of influences and knowledge to draw from. Just like eating a healthy diet, all of the different genres provide me with the literary vitamins and minerals I need. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t pig out on some comfort food from time to time, and for me that is sci-fi.