Finding the end

If you’ve read the last couple of blog posts about my current WIP, you may have noticed that the end of the story started off as “Kayla confronts the Archmage. Kayla wins. Everybody celebrates.” This is actually more specific than the end of my first-stage outline normally

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Open Mic Day

This is the slightly belated Open Mic Day that would have happened last week if I hadn’t had a software malfunction that messed up the notification. I think that is sorted out now, so the next one will be six weeks after this. So, talk amongst yourselves

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WIP Story development, part 2

Last week, I talked about getting my plot outline up to a sketchy 1200 words. Usually, my plot outlines start off fairly specific (“Kayla is in the library with Harkawn, reviewing past Dark Lord grimoires. She is annoyed – what good is summoning a horde of mosquitoes?

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Literary Prophecies

Prophecies seem to have become a staple of fantasy literature. Most of them are either self-fulfilling prophecies, where the characters’ attempts to circumvent the prophecy are what makes it come true, or they are riddles – symbolic language or plays on words that are puzzles for the

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Three problems in dialog

First, a public service announcement: the Worldshaper’s podcast which did an interview with me a few months back is running a Kickstarter to fund an anthology of short fiction by authors they’ve interviewed. The URL is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/shapers-of-worlds-volume-ii The authors involved will be people who  were interviewed in

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Characters and plans

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltk People in general do not do things completely at random. There may not be much conscious, deliberate planning involved in stumbling out of bed in the morning and getting the coffee or tea started, but

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Scene choreography part 2

This is a continuation of the pre-open-mic post on choreography. Last time, I was talking mostly about the macro level – the order things happen in the overall story. This week, I’m going to talk more about the scene level. Choreographing a scene starts with the things

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Macro scene choreography

Choreography is defined as “the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion, form, or both are specified.” It is most often applied to dance, but the term gets used for pretty much anything that involves a need

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