New year, new year’s resolutions. There are recommendations all over the web about how to make resolutions, which ones to make, and how to keep them for longer than a week. Googling “new year’s resolutions for fiction writers” got me four million hits. So I took a
Read more →First, some housekeeping. December 23 is the last day to register for my online worldbuilding workshop at Odyssey, if you are interested. I will be taking next week off for the holidays, so no more blog posts until the new year. Now the question: I’m having a
Read more →Science fiction is often described as “the literature of ideas,” as if no other kind of writing includes any, this in spite of the fact that the first question every professional writer, regardless of genre, gets thoroughly sick of is “Where do you get your ideas?” The
Read more →A while back, Kin asked “What reason (other than simple laziness) would necessitate a mere patch, plug, or ignore of plot holes in a story?” “Necessitate” is the key word here, because in writing, necessity is in the eye of the author and/or reader. There are never
Read more →I just spent two weeks “on vacation” in Orlando, FL (which is a long story, full of disasters and near-disasters, but which ended up being fun and relaxing in spite of everything), and now I have to get back into a work rhythm that I’ve been totally
Read more →Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. In case anyone doesn’t have an e-book of SORCERY AND CECELIA and wants one, a bunch of places are doing Black Friday/Cyber Week discounts. Amazon will have it at $1.99 on Friday, 11/25; Kobo will promote it on 11/28, and Apple’s Cyber Week (I’m
Read more →Plot holes are often one of the first things writers (and editors, and readers) look for in a first draft. That character who got mugged walking home from the bar – why was he walking when you mentioned two chapters back that he arrived on a bicycle?
Read more →Rolling revision is another one of those controversial writing techniques that many people discourage but a few people swear by. I am a rolling reviser, but I recognize that for a lot of writers, it has serious drawbacks, so I’ll try to talk about it from both
Read more →Nanowrimo started yesterday. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last seventeen years, Nanowrimo is short for National Novel Writing Month, a writer’s challenge that started in 1999 with the idea of writing a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and 11:59 on November
Read more →A quick aside: Sorcery and Cecelia in ebook form is on sale today, Wednesday October 26, for $1.99 through the International BookBub newsletter. So if you were waiting to pick up a copy, now’s your chance. Back to our regularly scheduled post. Regardless of whether an author
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