For those who just couldn’t stand it

Here is the picture of my office as of yesterday morning. It is still pretty much the same, except for the cat bed next to the computer, which I had to add to keep Karma from trying to sleep on the stuff I was working on. And

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It’s 2014

Happy New Year! It is the first day of 2014. I’ve spent the last week or so tidying up loose ends from 2013, and now it’s time to look forward to the next year. I was going to upload a picture of my cleared-up desk, but apparently

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Getting Ready for Next Year

We’re coming down to the end of 2013. A lot of folks use the week between Christmas and New Years to “clean house” – that is, they take stock of where they are, clear up outstanding projects, and generally get ready to start the new year on

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Still Merry Christmas

  As you have probably noticed, updating the blog was more complicated than we thought. It is now here, hopefully for good this time. Meanwhile, I just want to say Merry Christmas to all the readers out there, the ones who read this blog, the ones who read my

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Introductory Information

First off, an announcement: we are going to take another run at the New Improved Updated Blog and Website Format, starting tomorrow. I think we have the majority of bugs worked out this time, but if anybody spots anything, please email me. One of the other big

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Hooks again

Ok, shameless promotional stuff first. The hardcopy paperback version of Wrede on Writing is now available, and as a promotion, the Goodreads site is doing a giveaway – five people, selected at random from those who register, will each get a free copy. For anyone interested the

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Wrong Reasons

Once upon a time, long before I was ever published, I was talking with a friend about things we’d like to do someday, and I confessed that I wanted to write a novel, and even showed him a few chapters. The friend allowed as how he wanted

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Series Considerations

So I’m sitting here trying to think of a blog post for today, and I get an email from a woman who is preparing to sit down and write her first novel, but she has questions. I read a little farther, and it turns out that she’s

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Uses for Plot Shapes

So we come to why I have been thinking about plot shapes for the past week. It started with an article on the traditional triangle plot that mentioned in passing that there were other possibilities, but didn’t give them much consideration beyond that. Naturally, this got me

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