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 […]
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 […]
Wanna help me make a decision?
Which of these should I work on for NaNoWriMo? Richie Synopsis: Slice-of-life in a space opera setting about an up-and-coming rock star trying to juggle that with family life. First paragraph: Somewhere out there in the tri-galaxies, one of Richie’s older sisters was fighting to free a world from tyranny. Somewhere out there, another of […]
Works in progress, September edition
Welcome to the first installment of a new regularish feature where I will share info on my works in progress. I used to do this regularly, but then my blog had a readership of me, so it was pointless. Now I have a slightly bigger readership than that, so it’s not pointless. Also, I like lists […]
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 […]
Music and writing
There are authors who can’t write unless there’s complete silence. There are authors who can’t write without listening to a meticulously created playlist. I’m neither of these. Silence makes me wonder what my pets are up to. They have a magical ability to know when I’m writing and decide it’s time for me to play […]