January 4, 2012 – 6:18 am
First off, thanks to everyone who commiserated about the computer crash. I now have all my critical data back (including my in-process Skyrim game! Very important, right up there with the email archives, the address book, and the calendar. Books? Those were never the problem; I’m paranoid about backing up work-in-process, finished work, copyedited versions…) [...]
January 1, 2012 – 6:55 am
Last Wednesday, I updated my blog, checked my email, did all the usual computer things, and at the end of the day, I logged off and went to bed, as usual. Thursday morning when I turned on the computer…everything had gone missing. By which I mean, the machine still ran, but it behaved as if [...]
December 28, 2011 – 8:17 am
The holiday season is a time for parties, especially the sort of parties that people throw in order to introduce interesting friends and neighbors to other interesting friends and neighbors they haven’t met but might like. It’s a great way to meet interesting people, and the first thing most of them ask is, “So, what [...]
December 25, 2011 – 6:18 am
Merry Christmas (or midwinter holiday of your choice), everybody! I’m mostly taking the day off, but I couldn’t leave you with nothing at all on the blog, so I thought I would give you some links.
As some of you may recall, back in September I had a three-day visit from a team of video and [...]
December 7, 2011 – 6:34 am
A while back, I did a post on electronic publishing in general, in which I stated that I didn’t know much, but nobody else does, either, yet. In the interim, I’ve learned a bit more, and I thought this would be a good time to share, because next week, the five Lyra books are being [...]
November 27, 2011 – 6:41 am
This is the time of year when a lot of high school students are thinking about college, and as a consequence, I’ve had several earnest requests for information about the best places to go to school, what to major in, etc. Since I usually figure that what one person is brave enough to email and [...]
November 23, 2011 – 6:16 am
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., which is generally considered a family day, so I thought I’d talk about family and writing this time.
One way or another, family is something every writer has to deal with, and it’s never nice and clean-cut. Family can be supportive, or they can be a big obstacle, and sometimes [...]
October 5, 2011 – 6:58 am
The problem with sequels is that the writing and publishing process gives readers too much time to think.
Let me unpack that a little.
It takes me one to two years to write a novel, and this is fairly typical of most of the professional writers I know. Yes, there are folks who work faster without detriment [...]
September 25, 2011 – 6:59 am
Some years back, a good friend of mine told me a story about her nine-year-old son, who came to her wanting to read a particular series of adult books that he’d heard his late-teenaged siblings talking about. The books in question were great adventure books, but they did contain several explicit mentions of sex - [...]
August 17, 2011 – 6:49 am
Matt G. asked: The burning question for me is character depth. How can you encourage the readers to identify with your characters? How can you add “depth” to characters - so the reader is rooting for them?
This is a fairly difficult question to answer, largely because it’s something that took me a long time to [...]