Best wishes to everyone, whether this is a great time for you, a hard time, or a what’s-all-the-fuss-about time. I am happy–they finally came and fixed my internet line this morning! (It’s been unstable for weeks and getting steadily worse, but no longer.) Next week, it’ll be
Read more →This is my last blog post for 2022. (I always take the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s off, so next week will be an off-schedule Open Mic, and the count to the next one will reset on the first Tuesday of the year.) I asked a
Read more →In case anyone wondered, the interior pages got finished and turned in in good time. But today’s post is going to be more ranting about the WIP. Fair warning. Multiple viewpoint stories are inherently complicated. As a reader, I often find myself interested mainly in one specific
Read more →So the interior pages for The Dark Lord’s Daughter arrived last week, and they’re due on Thursday, which means I don’t have enough brain right now to talk about anything else. First a little explanation: The interior pages are what they used to call “galleys” or “page
Read more →Found this in a batch of older questions: When one conveys descriptions, actions, or background information through dialogue, does it count as showing or telling? The short answer is, the writer is “showing” two characters in conversation. People in conversations are of course “telling” each other things;
Read more →By coincidence, this open mic arrives on Thanksgiving week (in the U.S.), which means I get to slave over a hot stove for the next two days instead of over a hot keyboard! Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
Read more →I’m out of questions for the time being, so we’re back to my random musings on writing in general. Back when I was a beginning writer, I had a horror of “wasting writing time” by writing stuff that wasn’t actual pay copy. If it wasn’t intended to
Read more →As for requests: Elevator pitches, are there different varieties? (Because I’ve heard them described as both one-sentence set-up only, and as three-sentence complete but extremely abridged plot summaries.) –Deep Lurker My first reaction is that you’re over-thinking this. An elevator pitch doesn’t have rules or even a
Read more →When you have a weird question (e.g. “If someone gained encyclopaedic knowledge of an advanced civilization, how could they improve technology in a medieval fantasy world?”), how do you research it? .–Alpakka Researching for fiction depends on what the writer needs to know. That sounds really obvious,
Read more →Will you do a post on how to handle subplots, specifically in a single-viewpoint story? I am relatively new to writing longer fiction and have never dealt with them before. –E. Beck My first reaction is that if you are having trouble with subplots, begin by ignoring
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