So, you want to make your work–book, movie, sculpture, whatever–perfect, don’t you? You want it to shine. And you’re going to polish it, rewrite it, re-imagine it, and retcon it every chance you get? Or maybe you just can’t resist adding those few last-minute flourishes? Well, you’re in good company. The impulse to tinker is [...]
You hear a lot of talk of “discovery writers” and “outliners” in the writing world. The “pantsers” and the “plotters,” respectively. It’s true that there are a lot of people that fall into both categories–including many of my friends–and human nature loves dichotomies, but I’ve never fit comfortably either, and I suspect I’m not alone. [...]
Writing fiction in the age of the Internet can be fraught for the author who values authenticity–particularly if you write historical or technical fiction. Since the glorious thing about writing fiction is that you essentially make shit up to entertain other people, there are a range of opinions about the technical rigor to which writers [...]
A funny thing happens during times of great industrial upheaval: Everyone wants a piece of the new deal, but nobody wants to take what they perceive to be a risk. Most established players retrench, hold on to what’s familiar, and try to shout down anyone with a contravening opinion. It’s human nature to get defensive [...]
Preface: I mentioned this in the first post in this series, but because I’m going to be talking about some specific points of law in this post, I need to reiterate: I am not a lawyer, am not qualified to dispense legal advice, and none of what follows should be considered as legal advice. All [...]
And the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, saying “It is done.” All the original writing for Free Will is now done. I have a few days of continuity tweaking ahead of me, and then some cutting, but it really [...]
When I started writing The Antithesis Progression, I had a nice, tidy three-book series in mind. Then I wrote it, and discovered that what I thought was book 1 was actually 2 books cleverly hiding inside my head under a single title. Well, no problem there. Turns out there was an excellent break point where [...]
There’s a black art to titles. Some of them have it, some of them don’t. “What’s ‘It’–aside from a Stephen King novel?” you ask. “It” is that thing that makes you notice. The thing that makes you pick up a book and look at the back cover. The thing that makes a title to a [...]
It’s mid January, and time for your vegetables. This year’s first link salad is here–I hope you enjoy this sampling of my weidrness and wanderings from around the web!
As you might be able to tell by the title, I’m fed up with a number of the stock, boring, and stupid plots that get dressed up as “Science Fiction,” though they also show up in other forms in series drama. These tropes represent the functional equivalent of training wheels for writers, exhibit an appalling [...]
The following is intended for other writers working to find their stride. I hope something in the following meanderings is useful to you as you hash out your process. Fall is crazy, right? Halloween, Thanksgiving, School restarting, Christmas, RenFaire, Dickens Faire, conventions, festivities, and all those bleeding birds nesting in my trees and eating my [...]
If 2007 was the year I got serious about writing, then 2010 was the year when attitude and education caught up with intent. Think of it as the difference between declaring a major (2007) and doing your first internship in a Ph.D. program (2010). Up till this year, I did one book a year and [...]
It’s NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, when many of you who don’t normally write will be trying to write a short novel in 30 days (and some of you who normally do will try to get a jump start on projects that need doing). Generally people find it easy to start a novel, not [...]
If you want the background for this post, check The Binge post for a description of my recent unintentional astronomical word count adventure. Short version: I wrote one hundred twenty three thousand words in fifty days. Yow. So, you may ask, what did I learn from writing 123k words in 50 days? Plenty. What do [...]
By the time I finish writing this article, I’ll have written 123,000 words in fifty days. The output constitutes two short-book-length works (one novel, one reference work), nine blog posts, two commissioned articles, and some odds and ends of work on another novel. For the first half of the duration, I did it by accident. [...]
