Finished up the last chapter of Circuit Magician yesterday around noon; spent the rest of the afternoon doing final clean-up of assorted things that had been tagged to fix but somehow hadn’t gotten fixed yet, and sent it off. This morning, I had notes from my editor
Read more →Thanks to some last-minute schedule changes and cancellations, I am now very confident that the first draft of Circuit Magician will be finished by late this week, even if I don’t quite make the June 1 deadline. Since I’ve already cleared that with my editor, this will
Read more →One major plot point to go, and about a week and a half to do it in. I got lucky on the deadline – my editor is on vacation, and while he will be back June 1, he’ll be spending his first few days catching up. So
Read more →OK, I said I’d post updates on how things are going. This week wasn’t bad, but everything is taking longer than I think it should (longer in the more-words-and-scenes sense, rather than longer in the more-time-to-write-one-scene sense). In one way, this is good; it means there’s lots
Read more →Where are your best places to write? I can write pretty much anywhere; I learned that trick when I was still working and had very limited time in which to write. (“A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open
Read more →Circuit Magician (the tentative title of the sequel to Thirteenth Child) has been giving me fits for months…years, if the truth be told. Many of the problems have been external (I didn’t have any control over when Mom had her stroke), but it’s also just a tough
Read more →Theme is something I’ve been thinking about for years, because it’s one of those writing things that I can’t seem to ever quite grasp when it comes to my own writing process. Thanks to my excellent high school English teachers, I can pick out and analyze themes in
Read more →So I’m working along, facing my third deadline extension, way behind on everything, with lots of vital-or-at-least-urgent non-writing stuff going on. I FINALLY get past the exceedingly sticky argument scene I’ve been poking at for the last two months, and on into the next bit of wandering-around-the-settlements.
Read more →I’ve been mulling over green_knight and accio_aqualung’s request for something on plotting multi-volume stories for a few days now. It’s not easy, because on this question, I’m working mainly from observation. The closest I’ve come to writing a multi-volume story myself are 1) the Lyra books, which
Read more →Worldbuilding in some sense is a requirement for all writers. The people and places in fiction may have analogs in real life, but a writer in the U.S. cannot depend on every reader (or even most readers) being familiar with the Lincoln Park area of Chicago or the
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