E. P. Beaumont

One of the mysteries of writing, or indeed any art form, is the gravitation of audience. If somebody’s paying attention in a friendly way, sometimes even if they’re just in the same room, it works.

I’m musing on this Eternal Truth this afternoon after a write-in with six newfound Best Writing Buddies, some of whom I know from Ye Olde Day Jobbe and some of whom are friends of said Writing Buddies. We reserved a conference room at the public library, brought our writing implements–notebooks, laptops, Alphasmart Neos–and our headsets, and had at it like wild things. It’s called a write-in, and it’s a NaNoWriMo thing. And you would understand, because it’s just this simple:

Write. Just write. Don’t worry about whether it’s any good, just let one thing follow another. That’s what the headset and juicy music are for. It’s like distracting the toddler with a toy: my Internal Censor seems to resonate to the same frequency as the piece of my brain that wants to parse Finnish into something intelligible. So I listen to rockin’ Nordic Roots music with Finnish lyrics, and the inner demon forgets to tell me that I am a crap writer.

The company of others provides Positive Peer Pressure; the sound of their tippytapping keeps my fingers nimbly rockin’ on.

The true mystery is this: why do I write more, and more wildly, in company than alone?

And what language will silence the censor, if I ever learn Finnish?

Hello, Dear Readers! My name is E. P. Beaumont, and here are a few facts about me:

I’m a writer and a reader. I’m also a shape-shifter with a writer’s resume, which means that in real life, or what passes for it, I have six or seven different resumes, depending on what kind of day job I’m angling for. Day jobs thus far have not included driving hack, working on a whaling ship, or gigs in the intelligence services, but that still leaves me a lot of material. I write what I know, make up what I don’t, and research like a demon to fill in the gaps, which works just fine, because:

I’m a print addict. I read widely (and wildly) and I like to think aloud about what I’m reading, so my posts here will include some number of book reviews. Subjects on which I’m obsessive include: other writers, race, sex, class, military history, history of technology, philosophy, mathematics, literary criticism, literary and intellectual lineages, art history, artistic practice, and the places where all of the above cross.

I write all over the place. My work as a writer sits on the border between genres, and my rite of passage was learning to write it first and classify it later. So my posts here also will include some notes on writing process, my own and other writers’. I hope that readers and writers alike will find them entertaining and helpful. There are 64,000 paths to salvation and at least that many ways to write a novel.

If you want to see the kind of thing I like to write, check out my Works in Progress. I’ll be adding to this list as time goes one, and hopefully some time in the near future, I will be adding a page for ‘Published Works’. In the meantime, I will be sharing brief excerpts of my work weekly as part of the Six Sentence Sunday: that’s six lines from a work in progress, no more and no less. Special thanks to the inimitable Devin Harnois for turning me on to this entertaining challenge.

Last, I’m a huge fan of National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as the International Festival of First Draft, and come November, I’ll be sending dispatches from the front as, alongside hundreds of thousands of colleagues across the world, I take up the challenge of producing a finished first-draft novel manuscript in a month.