Once again it is open mike time! And back to school week, too. How has everyone’s end-of-summer been? What are you working on? What do you need or want to know?
Read more →First, I have to apologize for this being late. There was a huge thunderstorm Monday night that knocked out my power and internet, and while the power came back quickly, it screwed up my router, which meant lots of fiddling around, and I didn’t get everything put
Read more →Apologies for the delay, but internet failure means that there will be no post today. Regularly scheduled service will resume as speedily as possible.
Read more →Why do novels have chapters, and how do you figure out where to start or end them? Well, not all novels do have chapters ( see most of Terry Pratchett’s books and John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless for example). Most do, though, and have since the
Read more →Since before the Internet began, it seems, there’s been an ongoing argument about “plot-driven” stories vs. “character-driven” stories. By this time, there are a metric ton of how-to-write articles arguing that one is “better” than the other. And all those scare quotes are there because everybody in
Read more →I spent last weekend mostly at Mythcon 2024, the annual convention of the Mythopoeic Society. It’s held in a different place every year, and this year, that place was Minneapolis. We regularly have a multitude of SF-style conventions here (including, but not limited to, Fourth Street Fantasy,
Read more →Every time I talk to a new group of would-be writers, one of the inevitable questions is “How do you find time to write?” There is no good answer to this question, because there is never enough time to do everything—the things one must do (eat, sleep,
Read more →It’s another open mic/mike week! Feel free to continue any discussions from previous posts, ask for better explanations or clarification, come up with whole new questions, or just catch everyone up on your latest news. I’m trying to get the house and cats set up so I
Read more →So I had half my playing around with structure post done for this week, and then Kevin said this: “Pat, do you think a preset structure likely makes a story more predictable, or are structure and predictability unrelated?” There are a couple of things to consider here.
Read more →Story structure is one of those perennial topics in writing advice, and I haven’t talked about it for a while. So it’s probably time to revisit. I have two dressers in my bedroom. One was clearly made before the advent of mass production; the other was made
Read more →
