Too Hot

It’s  too hot to post anything too serious today, but here’s an idea worth considering….try writing a few chapters of childhood events in dramatic narrative, avoiding too much of “we used to do..” and showing the scenes instead.   The reasoning behind my suggesting this form of creative writing boils down to clarity.  Often, when a [...]

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A Short Writing Sample

I’m doing lots of creative writing again and polishing the rewrite of my second novel, a psychological thriller dealing with memory flashbacks.    The story so far: Alan is a web designer, living in London and married to Lana. But when Lana disappears, abandoning their eight-year-old son, Alan’s nightmare is just beginning. Forced to move to [...]

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Friday’s Concert

The piano recital went well.  I played Grieg’s piano sonata in E minor, four of the preludes from the op 28 set by Chopin, Hungarian Rhapsodies no 5 and 12 by Franz Liszt, Chopin’s “military” polonaise,  Debussy’s Clair de Lune and the arpeggio study in C minor from the final set of Chopin studies.    And I wasn’t even that nervous.

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RSI struggles

Sometimes, I get problems with RSI.   Physiotherapy exercises help, as long as I do them gently.   The other day, I read something fascinating in the health section of the Daily Mail.   Heat rubs and cold treatments containing menthol as the active ingredient don’t actually do anything to solve the problem, other than temporarily remove the [...]

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Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the day of the concert.  I think the programme is at a reasonable standard, although I feel I haven’t fully mastered the first item of the recital, the Grieg Piano Sonata in E minor.   I’m particularly looking forward to the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies at the end (nos 5 and 12).

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Trimming The Plot

I’m at the 50,000 word stage of my second novel again, a psychological thriller set in the English countryside.  This time, I’m focusing on clarity rather than a restructuring of the narrative events, a sort of trimming away at the plot.   A bit like a brief haircut to keep things neat.   As I stated in [...]

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Piano Recital

The piano recital is now less than a week away.   Everything seems to be going to plan, although I keep getting slight memory lapses in the final movement of the Grieg piano sonata op 7.  I’m also working on encore items and have started polishing up one of the Chopin  studies – the arpeggio study [...]

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SPAM!

I have some fuzzy memories of Spike Milligan’s cafe scenes about not liking spam (a form of processed ham), but now I seem to be getting loads of Spam messages on my blog. How annoying.  My site is about music and the creative arts, like novel writing and story telling.

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The Sections that Count

I’m revising my second novel again, a psychological thriller set in the English countryside. The same issue keeps coming up – trying to decide what to keep and what to delete. Removing a superfluous section or a character that has no real function in a story can greatly benefit a piece of writing, but sometimes [...]

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A Piano Recital

It’s creeping up on me…on Friday 26th June, I’m giving a piano recital at St James’ Church in Muswell Hill, North London, at 8pm.   Fortunately, I managed to memorise the programme several months back, but I’m still hoping to perfect it and work on my general piano technique.    See earlier articles on Czerny, octave practice and [...]

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