Paul Blaney

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Paul Blaney

Goodreads Author


Born
in Upminster, Essex, The United Kingdom
Genre

Influences
Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, Chekhov (and the other Russians), Jorge ...more

Member Since
March 2011


I was born in England to parents who'd recently moved from Belfast. They were on their way to Tasmania, but that's another story (life). I'm the second of five children--two brothers, two sisters. Since studying Classics at college I've moved around a bit. I taught English for a year in Lisbon, had a short, dull career in reference publishing, and traveled in India, Australia and New Zealand. Then in early 1996 I ended up in Hong Kong, on a nice little island called Lamma. My experience of living and working in Hong Kong are the substance of my novella, Handover.

From Hong Kong I moved direct to Eugene, Oregon (cue culture shock!) where I studied for an MFA in Creative Writing. Back in London, I taught, wrote, and met my lovely wife Karen w
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Paul Blaney Writer's block = perfectionism. Lower your standards (a little). Allow yourself to write a poor sentence/paragraph/page. You can make it better later.…moreWriter's block = perfectionism. Lower your standards (a little). Allow yourself to write a poor sentence/paragraph/page. You can make it better later. (less)
Paul Blaney The hours. (These are also the worst thing.)
Average rating: 4.04 · 48 ratings · 17 reviews · 8 distinct works
The Anchoress

3.71 avg rating — 24 ratings — published 2013 — 6 editions
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Handover

4.20 avg rating — 10 ratings2 editions
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Mister Spoonface

4.17 avg rating — 6 ratings4 editions
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Tales of the Decongested, V...

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4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2008
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Jardin des Animaux

it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 2 ratings2 editions
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Desperate Remedies

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it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2008
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Hellbent

it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2013
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Stories from another London...

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really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2012
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More books by Paul Blaney…

New Story at Cafe Irreal

Brief, whimsical new story of mine provided for reader relish at:
http://cafeirreal.alicewhittenburg.co...

God Bless Café Irreal and all who sip-sup in her!
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Published on February 13, 2015 06:04 Tags: cafe, fiction, irreal, short, story
The Language of Bees
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John Donne
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
John Donne, No man is an island – A selection from the prose

George Saunders
“Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.”
George Saunders

Elizabeth Bowen
“One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.”
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

Ian McEwan
“Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf--a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments.”
Ian McEwan, Atonement

Ted Hughes
“Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being - not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses - but a human being, we call it poetry.”
Ted Hughes

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