First, a moment of celebration, for a few weeks ago I finished the first very rough draft of the WIP! The working title for this project was "White Wedding" and it has been a trainwreck from start to finish. But most of it is on paper now and I'm going to ignore it for a... Continue Reading →
Lessons from contemporary fantasy
Way back in 2018, when I was at FutureScapes, I had the pleasure of seeing Fran Wilde give an excellent presentation on How to Boil Water. If you haven't had a chance to yet, I encourage you to see Fran give this lecture in person. Essentially, it is a thought exercise about a very basic... Continue Reading →
Why you should take a break
Towards the end of January I turned in the last round of deep edits on a project that I had been working on semi-unexpectedly for about two months, referenced in my last post. I promptly felt like falling down and sleeping for ten days, despite the fact that I had just come back from vacation... Continue Reading →
The two kinds of writer’s block
Some days, being a creative and trying to build a career out of it feels like being on a hamster wheel you can't get off of. I am a human who happens to produce an overabundance of ideas. I'm good at it. Execution of said ideas? Sometimes difficult. Ideas? I have them for days. A... Continue Reading →
You can do everything right
Last week Publisher's Weekly published an article about the increasing inequity in advances for traditionally published authors. This comes in the wake of several years of writing income studies that are showing median writer income to be decreasing steadily. From the 2018 report by the Author's Guild: Median incomes of all published authors who were... Continue Reading →
The invisible price of creating
It's impossible to make something from nothing. I spend a lot of time feeling guilty for things. It's one of my flaws, and like many flaws it can also be a strength. It's good to know what your impacts on others are, and it's good to try to mediate those impacts as you are able.... Continue Reading →
Making a plan for writing
I have a work plan so I can keep up with my monthly To Do List. It looks like this: There are good parts of having a work plan. For example, I always know what I want to be working on next. Sort of. I mean I know what I wanted to be working on... Continue Reading →
Staying informed about the writing community
With that in mind, I wanted to share with you some Twitter accounts, websites, and generally informative paraphernalia for the writing-inclined. These links are mostly targeted towards fantasy and science fiction writers.
So you finished NaNoWriMo. Now what?
National Novel Writing Month is a cool idea, and I usually try to participate in some fashion every year. The first (and much different) draft of my first book was written in this time. I've never made 50,000 words, as I've mentioned elsewhere, but I usually do somewhere between 20-30,000, since I find it useful... Continue Reading →
Where are their parents?
The S.O. and I are watching Avatar: The Last Airbender together. It's a rewatch for me, first time through for him, and we love it a lot. I preface this post with that love, because I'm about to wade into a wide-scale critique of a flaw I find sort of annoying with a lot of... Continue Reading →
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