So yesterday I started writing again. Vacation + sickness means no writing, but taking that kind of break can make it hard to get started again. I compare it to a cold engine. It’s hard to get the thing to turn over once it’s been sitting still for awhile. Writing is definitely like this. I…
Some people like “How To” books. They buy “How to be a better ____” books over and over again when to me they so often repeat the same information or contradict one another. Sometimes they read like the person read the other book and decided to do his best “this isn’t really plagiarism” impersonation. Needless…
A combination of bad advice and bad writing as a result of that advice has kind of got me stuck on PRINCE OF CATS. I have two other projects I’m working on right now, but in a few months, I’ll be back to it, and I’ll have to fix it, which is a daunting prospect.…
Suzanne Johnson posted today on Roni Loren’s writing blog, Fiction Groupie1. Suzanne is discussing picking names for your characters. This is a topic relevant to EVERYONE and a particular challenge to fantasy authors who so often create cultures from the ground up and can’t name their protagonist Joe despite how awesome people named Joe are.…
I used to be a podcaster. That’s like public speaking except in private and with a record that people can reference years later. For that reason, there are certain words one needs to eliminate from one’s vocabulary to improve at public speaking. The biggest culprit is “ummmm” and “uhhhh” which we tend to default to…
I’ve participated in a couple of Writer’s Digest online seminars, one featuring Kristin Nelson and one feature Sara Megibow both from the Nelson Agency. During Kristin’s presentation, she mentioned that the main plot of your book, that first serious hook, should occur within the first 30-50 manuscript pages. Now this took me back. Having come…
I will admit that I’m not a fan of collaboration. But I realized today that it’s not a matter of not being a fan of collaboration, it’s just that collaboration has never been presented to me in a fashion that I particularly cared for. But then I got linked to a video of Joseph Gordon-Levitt…
It’s hard to keep track of topics when you’re on a variety of soap boxes. I’ve written in two different live journals, hosted a podcast, and now how this blog/journal. Sometimes you think you’ve written about a topic when you haven’t. Or, you think you’ve written about it in one place when really it was…
I am not anti-social. In fact, I love being the center of attention. I have wanted to be the storyteller since I was five, lying about the size of the frog I caught1. The trick is, there are a lot of social situations where I cannot be the center of attention, and in those cases…
The general rule is that no sign exists until after someone does what the sign instructs not to do (thus my favorite sign is “Do not lick the C-4”). You should consider the Bill of Rights to the American Constitution much like a sign. The reason why those 10 items were enumerated? Because they happened.…