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 […]
Screw you, Amazon and Google
I try to keep this blog professional and only related to my life as a writer, but this time I really need to vent where it might be seen. Besides, ranting about the Kindle app for Mac not working is sort of related to writing. Yesterday I opened my Kindle app and started to read […]
Confession time
I have a confession to make that won’t make me many friends: I like hyper-competent beautiful characters. Notice I didn’t say “I like Mary Sues.” There’s a reason for this . . . read carefully because lots of people seem to have trouble with this one, more every year: They’re not the same thing! First, […]
Some things that need to stop
I had another post in mind for today, had a clever title even, then something happened in a book I’m reading, something I’ve seen far too much lately, and I need to vent a bit now. Author of the book? If you happen to see this, remember, it’s not about you. You didn’t do […]
Jake’s Last Mission, conflict, a defense of Kristark’s Coronation as a story, probably other stuff too because I’m writing this right before bed so my inner editor is already asleep
First, I apologize in advance for, even for me, an unusual amount of rambly-ness in this post. And typos. And homonym errors. If I had any sense, I’d probably wait until tomorrow . . . err, later today, I guess . . . to write this. If I had any sense, however, I’d have gone […]
The Yellow Wallpaper, the problems with star ratings, and escapist fiction
In college I briefly was an English major. During this less than enjoyable time, I had to read many, many depressing stories. “The Yellow Wallpaper” has come in my mind to represent all of them, partially because it was one of the final straws in me changing my major. It was a brilliant story, an […]
Authors Are People Too
In defense of George R. R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, and any other author who doesn’t churn out books as fast as their readership thinks they should: Neil Gaiman says it best here, but after spending some time reading reviews of Patrick Rothfuss’s books today (I’ve read part of Name of the Wind and was wanting […]
Thoughts on reviews and reviewing
For reasons that are complicated to explain without getting into oddities of book promotion that I’m pretty sure most indie authors already know and no one else cares about, I’ve been reading lots of things to review them lately. I’ve also just recently gotten in the habit, probably because of this (and possibly because […]
Well, it had to happen eventually
I got my first bad review. Now, I know conventional wisdom is that bad reviews are better for authors than good reviews because we can learn from them. However, given what my bad review says, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to learn. Here is the entirety of the review: “Book was awful…one of the […]