Monthly Archives: February 2011

Stressing Out

February 27, 2011 – 6:21 am

Sooner or later, everyone gets stressed, and stress affects everybody’s writing, one way or another. There are a few folks whose writing is their escape from stress, who write more when they get more stressed and less when they get happy, but that doesn’t seem to be all that common among published writers (probably because [...]

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No Snow Days

February 23, 2011 – 6:05 am

The Twin Cities are currently cleaning up after the…fourth or fifth? I forget…big storm of the season. Somewhere between a foot and a half and two feet of snow fell from Sunday afternoon to Monday evening, on top of the more-than-a-normal-winter’s-worth that we’d already had by the end of January. The snow mountains at the [...]

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Sax and violins

February 20, 2011 – 6:35 am

A long time back, a friend of mine (tongue firmly in cheek) told me that when it came to fiction, all the trashy stuff was full of sex and violence, while all the great literature was about love and death. The truth underneath that bit of word play is that which you have – sex [...]

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The Eight Deadly Words

February 16, 2011 – 6:30 am

“I don’t CARE what happens to these people.” – Dorothy J. Heydt Stories are, at bottom, about people (or people-analogs, like anthropomorphized talking animals). But more than that, they’re about people or people-analogs that the reader cares about. Hooks and cliffhangers, opening in medias res, lots of fast-paced action, brilliant worldbuilding, intricate plots – all [...]

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The Value of Perversity

February 13, 2011 – 6:40 am

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, one of my many editor friends, once claimed that writers are like otters. Apparently, if you are trying to train animals, the normal method is to provide praise and rewards when they do something you would like them to do; the theory is that the animal thinks “He liked that! Cool! I’ll [...]

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Good enough

February 9, 2011 – 6:44 am

On Monday I was commiserating with a businessman friend about the miserable state of the economy, the dismal job market, the Packers winning the Superbowl (because he cares, not because I do), and various other usual topics, when he mentioned in passing that he couldn’t find the right person to fill a particular job opening. [...]

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It always happens to me

February 6, 2011 – 10:34 am

As regular readers of this blog may remember, a couple of months back I realized I’d gotten partway into the third of the Frontier Magic books and realized that I’d gotten the events in the wrong order. Not “wrong” in the sense that I’d gotten cause and effect reversed (you know, the sort of thing where someone’s [...]

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The Lego Theory Part the Last

February 2, 2011 – 6:40 am

This is the last of this series of posts. Really. I mean it. Part of why it’s the last is that I’m up to scenes, and I’m not really sure I can take this analogy this far, let alone any farther. Paragraphs were OK, because they’re the linking point between the basic blocks of language [...]

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