When you drop a rock into a pond, ripples spread out from it in rings that keep going for a long way before they gradually flatten out. Once everything adjusts to the new rock, the water goes back to calm and flat. The bigger the rock, the
Read more →I sold my first novel in 1980, which is very convenient for calculating how long I’ve been at this. Back then, I expected my writing to be a side hustle (though that term hadn’t been invented yet). And because I thought my primary income would derive from
Read more →So I just finished the page proofs for How to Run Your Evil Empire, which has me thinking about the differences between writing the first draft, revising it, and polishing it. For those of you who haven’t discovered Elle Cordova yet, this video sums that part up
Read more →It’s an Open Mike week, and Halloween is on the way, so… Talk amongst yourselves. I have more copyedits to finish reviewing.
Read more →The Tiffany Problem has been turning up in online discussions and articles since at least 2018, but writers have been talking about it informally for at least two decades before that, particularly in science fiction and fantasy circles. My first encounter with the term was in the
Read more →It has taken me a long, long time to really begin to understand how the story structures people describe—the various act structures, the hero’s journey, the pick-a-number “basic plots,” and so on—interact with the writing process for different writers. A large part of the problem is that
Read more →Having lost the past week to the Anthropic mess, I am going to indulge myself in a minor rant. Bear in mind that I am neither a lawyer nor a computer programmer, and there are much broader issues than just the ones that affect published writers. For
Read more →Pacing is one of those things that most writers have to learn by doing. You need a feel for what’s working and what isn’t, the same way a marathon runner needs a feel for how much their body can do and still finish the race. Except that
Read more →So last time we met, I mentioned the two basic ways of turning a single short story into a novel: adding complications, subplots, characters and conflicts within the confines of the original story, or continuing on from the end of the short story (and letting the extra
Read more →So I got a little confused about dates last week, and forgot that this week is an Open Mic. That means that next week is when I will be talking about turning a single short story into a novel, and this week everybody else gets to talk about
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