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It’s not fun until someone loses an eye.
I grossed myself out today during writing. I don’t know if it’s because the AC is broken and it’s 90 degrees up here and the humidity is through the roof, but I apparently needed to outdo myself in fiction. It was one of those weird moments where I’d planned for the scene to go one way and it took a sharp, brutal detour in a direction I hadn’t anticipated. Like the title says, someone literally loses an eye in the process. Of his own volition. I can get away with a bit that I normally couldn’t in Dev’s narrative, because he’s on this Dante-esque journey. I’ve got to hit some…
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Birthday goals, and halfway there.
No, this has nothing to do with football. (Or, soccer.) Just a quick one before the D&D game starts. My birthday is tomorrow, and I wanted to play D&D with our amazing group. However, I also wanted to achieve a personal birthday goal; I wanted to hit 55,000 in the WIP which marks the exact halfway point in the novel. I had until tomorrow to do this but finished today. Personal goals are important. It’s been hard for me this year, as I usually try to mimic the output of Important Published Writers. (I was reading a post of mine from last year when I wrote 35K in ten days…
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The Novel’s Life
I have said it before: novels have lives of their own. Maybe I should expect it by now, but it still amazes me how a book can simply do things that I didn’t anticipate–often without my permission. Case in point, my current work in progress Dustman. The idea for this book was simple: girl loves boy, boy goes mad, girl gets married to man who promises to care for boy, man loses boy, girl goes on quest to find boy. (Okay, not simple simple, but you know.) For me it’s even simpler, since I’m using a pre-developed world. It just started out with three characters, and three points of view.…
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Six Ways Twitter Can Make You A Better Writer
Many people consider Twitter solely for networking purposes, for meeting people with common interests and conversing. And while that’s a big part of it, Twitter can also be a very useful tool for improving your writing. When I first started building my Twitter follow list, I started with a lot of writers. And soon I discovered, mostly through feeds of people like Jay Lake and Paul Jessup, the #wip hashtag. Easy enough, WIP stands for “work in progress”. Basically, writers sample little 140 character or less sections from their work, sharing it with their friends and followers. Not every writer does this (either some don’t like the attention it brings, while…
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Crowded house: writing a party
Nah, not the kind with ale and food and wenches, though that happens from time to time. More like a party of people. At the moment I’m struggling with some of my chapters, as there are just too many damned people there all the time. Up until this point most of what I’ve written has been fairly straight-forward, with a handful of people doing fairly straight-forward things. Two, maybe three people in conversation, nice tight little story arcs… It was particularly comfortable in The Aldersgate because, well, every chapter was a new point of view, and helped me keep things neat and in a row. Now, in Peter of Windbourne,…
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Ringing the WIP.
I’m working on something right now, something I started during my horrific cold the last few weeks. I’m purposely taking a bit of a break from AGC (no worries, Alderpod listeners; I have plenty of chapters yet to read, so y’all won’t notice the difference) to work on this WIP, which is a project I’ve actually been contemplating since I started my undergraduate career a decade ago (how did ten years pass?!). At that point, I’d written thousands of pages of writing, but had yet to complete a novel; that came years later, with the end of the YA novel, Peter of Windbourne (unpublished… may never see the light of…
