Five star reviews — Clan Lord: Science Fiction Adventure Short Stories (Life Sticks) by Joel Babbitt
This is a book I volunteered to read and review based on the premise and the first page. Something about the author’s style drew me in that quickly. Here’s the description, via Goodreads: Science Fiction Adventure at the Edge of a Universe at War! The Life Sticks science fiction adventures bring a completely alien culture, […]
What bad writing advice really means
For some reason there’s not a reblog or repost or anything like that button on this awesome post, so you’ll have to click the link to read it. Trust me, if you’re an author or wannabe author, you want to click this: http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/bad-writing-advice-explained/
Characters, how to make them, and how not to
This is one of those posts that’s probably not going to be very interesting to non-authors. Sorry about that. What’s your character’s favorite color? His favorite song? His favorite piece of clothing? Describe his first kiss. Describe his first sexual experience. Who is his hero? These questions look familiar to any other authors reading this? […]
I may never be a best-seller, and I don’t care
My next payment from Amazon will be only 71 cents. That’s all it is most months. Now, there have been times when I’ve cried over this, times when I wondered what I could be doing to make my fiction more visible, because clearly people’d be buying it if they knew it existed. But, tonight that’s […]
Works in progress, October edition
I’m changing the format to make this easier to read and a lot less stream of conscious. I’ve made very little progress in anything this month. That’s a bit depressing. I’m blaming Patrick Rothfuss. I keep losing hours to The Name of the Wind. It’s an awesome book that I highly recommend. Anyway, NaNoWriMo is coming […]
NaNoWriMo and me
That time of year is nearly upon us again when writers all over the world abandon family, friends, pets, and good sense and attempt to commit to paper (or screen more commonly, I assume) 50,000 words in thirty days. This will be my third NaNoWriMo. I can’t recall when I first heard of NaNoWriMo. I […]
Trying something new
I’m shamelessly ripping bits of this off from Mary Robinette Kowal. Just thought I should acknowledge that first. I’ve always been a big believer in writing as a solitary process, but it’s becoming horribly clear to me that my stories could stand to have a few more sets of eyes looking over my early drafts, to catch […]
Five star reviews — The Enchanted Castle (Shioni of Sheba #1) by Marc Secchia
Welcome to the new feature I promised a few days ago. Every threeish weeks (I have a rough schedule for my posts, but I’m not letting myself make it a straight-jacket) I will be posting a review for a book I have given five stars to. Some of these will be books I received free […]
Not every story needs to be a novel
Today’s post starts a series that’s aimed at NaNoWriMoers, but should contain advice useful to all authors. Non-authory content will still be posted roughly once a week though, including a new feature starting later this week! Today I’m going to talk about story length. Now, this is a kind of odd thing for me to […]