Rob Parnell's Writing Academy Blog

My laptop blew a fuse the other day so I’ve had to take a kind of enforced holiday this week. Apologies to the people who might have been expecting me to do things for them - like review their MSS, etc - this week. I should get the computer back soon – though Dr PC have warned me I may have lost everything on the hard drive. Again. Hmm. C’est la vie. I guess it’s what we used to call a clean slate... I’ve been drawing pictures and recording music in the mean time. You know me. I like to keep busy doing at least something... We’re giving a two hour talk on Character, Agenda and Plot this afternoon at the local U3A. Should be fun. Outlining Vs Story Telling MR James, the famous short story writer, used to be a teacher. During the long evenings before the invention of television, he would entertain his students with the ghost stories he planned to write. That is, until he realised one day that telling his stories was getting in the way of his wr...

Dear Fellow Writer, Probably about a year later than everyone else we watched The Social Network the other night. Enjoyed it. Beautifully shot with one of Jim Jannard's RED cameras I do covet. Clearly the sub text is the irony that a guy with no real friends would set up the biggest 'friend' site on the Net. I don't know how true the film is to reality but I'm willing to believe its basic premise - that nerds, and their obsessions, are now set to rule the world! What puzzles me about the Net is how free web sites with no real profit to show for themselves, like Facebook, can be valued so astronomically high. Five to seven billion - for a website? Give me a break. The 2000 dot com crash (remember that) proved that Net sites were routinely overvalued - and yet we seem to have learned nothing - and continue the myth that hits mean profits for free website owners. Ask any writer trying to get traffic to their book site and you'll di...