Part of the way down Wisconsin (if you’re coming from Minnesota via I94), there’s a spot where they were doing road work about six months ago. They finished up the first part, but apparently they want to do more on the same stretch at some unspecified future
Read more →To my mind, a purely altruistic, goody-two-shoes hero is even more boring and unrealistic than a purely evil villain. Maybe because at least the villain is getting something out of being a villain? All those armies to order around, and castles, and power, and so on. OK, people
Read more →Cazaril, my Maine Coon/Tabby rescue cat, has been seriously annoyed with me lately. I think it’s all the travel — he really doesn’t like being left home with just Nimue for company. So he’s been trying to get me up several times a night. To play with
Read more →I probably should have posted this first, if I was going to blog about getting stuck. Because one of the more important things a writer needs to do when they’re stuck, before trying to apply any of the techniques I was talking about, is to figure out
Read more →Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a summer sewing class. On the first day, they showed everybody how to work the sewing machine and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could learn how to
Read more →I’ve been getting quite a few questions in the mailbag recently about writer’s block, and invariably they end with the anguished plea, “How do you know what happens next?” Which is a lot of the problem right there, in my opinion. Because “What happens next?” and “What
Read more →So Book 2 of Frontier Magic (Title To Come) seems to be getting some momentum up at last. Possibly because I finally have a bit of shape for this volume, which looks just a bit novel-like. Part of the difficulty, it seems in retrospect, has been that
Read more →One of the things you see a lot in fantasy stories is a villain who is purely and simply evil and knows it. No rationalizations, no semi-plausible rationales, not even a rotten childhood to blame it on, just the Dark Lord Who Wants To Take Over The World Because He
Read more →Every so often, I have an encounter with readers (usually academics, but sometimes not) who are happy to tell me, in detail and at great length, all the reasons why I wrote something, or wrote it in this or that particular way. (Usually because they object to
Read more →One of the plagues of beginning writers is the feeling that they are doing something “wrong.” Not wrong in the sense of technique – messing up viewpoint, for instance – but that they have made, are making, or will make, a wrong decision about “what happens next.” They are
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