Monthly Archives: May 2010

Down to the wire #4

May 30, 2010 – 7:27 am

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 work out fine. Sooner would be better, though. [...]

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Meeting the cast

May 26, 2010 – 7:30 pm

How well does a writer need to know her characters? There seem to be two sets of conventional wisdom about this. One holds that writing characters is rather like method acting – the writer has to become the character, so as to know them from the inside. The other is more mechanical, and is typified [...]

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Down to the wire #3

May 23, 2010 – 12:22 pm

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 as long as I get the ms. to [...]

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Hurry up and wait

May 19, 2010 – 7:42 am

The first thing you need to know about getting published is that the process is best described as interminably long stretches of boredom and anxiety, punctuated by moments of panic and frantic activity. And this applies to the whole process, not just the submission part. Most people who want to be professionally published figure out [...]

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Down to the wire 2

May 16, 2010 – 10:52 am

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 of juice in this story. In another way, [...]

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From the Mailbag #3

May 12, 2010 – 7:28 am

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 truck on the Interstate.” – Gene Wolfe) Most [...]

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Down to the wire

May 9, 2010 – 9:52 am

 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 book to do. The middle of a story [...]

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Dialog

May 5, 2010 – 10:54 am

Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk [...]

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Lights, camera…part IV

May 2, 2010 – 12:51 pm

So after rambling on for three posts, I’m finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of writing action scenes.  One of the first pieces of action-writing advice you find is usually “Use short sentences and sentence fragments,” because they pick up the pace, and an action scene has to be fast-paced, right? People who think [...]

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