Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
It’s once again time for an open mike day! Talk about what you’re doing, continue discussion you started earlier, ask questions, complain… whatever.
March Open Mike!
Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
It’s once again time for an open mike day! Talk about what you’re doing, continue discussion you started earlier, ask questions, complain… whatever.
The blog was having issues yesterday, throwing up expired/missing certificate errors and 404 pages.
Glad it’s back. Hope the web-elves have managed to put in a permanent fix.
Agreed!
It is all better–an easily identifiable and fixable thing that has been identified and fixed.
As for my own WIP, the past month or so has felt like trying to knit with my toes – and I’m not a good knitter and the yarn is tangled and knotted.
Heh. I can’t even find any yarn.
And yet this sentence is golden thread.
Had I but known, it was a bad time to be writing about people who live in the shadow of a looming problem too big for them.
I wrote a pillow fight, and a line I like where my protagonist’s commanding officer says, “I was told that you and the Ambassador had a pillow fight, and I just hope that’s not some euphemism I haven’t heard before.”
That is hilarious!! š¤£š
Thatās pretty good. š
Human, non-human, or a combination?
I imagine two of my non-human characters having a pillow fight and I wince. Then I imagine another two of my non-human characters having a pillow fight and it’s OK. Because weight class matters, even in a pillow fight.
Human protagonist and hybrid Ambassador, roughly his height and weight; but she eventually digs her claws into the pillow and it turns into a flurry of stuffing.
Oh, I love that! Is this a novel?
It is supposed to be (a sequel to the WIS) but I can’t find a main plot for the life of me, so they thwack each other with pillows and worry.
Hi,
Im new here. I read your dealing with Dragons book in highschool and I think it was the last YA book I actually liked. The other day I was at the library getting Dogman books for my 5yr old and stumbled across a whole row of your books. I had no idea that there was a whole series. I just finished Calling on Dragons last night and decided to google you. I am so happy to find you have written even more books and that I have the chance to say thank you. I thought I had grown out of YA but I think rather I just don’t jive with the more popular trends of it these days. Your prose is quite refreshing to me and Cimorene is one of those characters who has made a mark on my own.
So thank you and I’ll definitely be checking out your book on writing.
Welcome and thank you. I’m currently struggling with a) taxes and b) the climax of the current WIP, which has just arrived and which involves a confrontation in which I think about 30 characters are going to try to talk each other to death. How do I always end up with such huge casts of characters?
Because your backbrain is determined to give you council scenes in every book until you’re so good at them that you can’t wholly dislike them anymore? At least, that’s how my brain works.
That would explain many things, but not this one. It was supposed to be a duel! Lots of action in front of a big audience. Instead, nobody will shut up long enough to let the principals start their fight.
Honestly, some characters…
š¤£
Lining up ducks
David Weber’s Safehold series has the expression “Pigs and chickens in a row,” because while Safehold has imported Terran livestock of various kinds, it’s apparently lacking ducks and geese. But I’ve wondered if “Pigs and chickens” is something Weber made up or if it was an obscure variant of the saying.
I’m glad the website’s back! I was worried. I discovered something obvious lately, that despite much traditional writing advice to the contrary, youcan devise a plot structure suitable to your own story by simply naming the stops along the emotional journey you want to take your readers through, with an eye to setup and payoff. Turns out a short that I couldn’t figure out how the plot worked yet was satisfying to me and the first readers who had it did in fact have a 4-act plot, just built around a conceptual / thematic sequence suited for the story, not one anyone would consider standard. And deliberately choosing a similar sequence for the short story I was blocked on gave me a fairly straightforward path to go from here.
I mean someone made those plots we all hear about in the first place, whether western or otherwise, and most were developed against practical constraints of genre, so duh, any writer can put in some creative effort to make a nonce form. But doing this consciously instead of just subconsciously has proven helpful for me, so thought I’d share.
*I meant constraints of medium, not genre. Sorry.
Being in a critique group again has helped a lot. I have finished a complete read-through of my muddled project and brought some order out of the chaos. I also have a large file labelled Things to Fix.
How on earth do you create such beautifully detailed settings and then leave those details so matter-of-factly in the background? I just reread the Mairelon series and it’s so perfect, you nailed the time period, but it’s all sort of in the background of the main story – I never thought of it as an “annoyingly historical book” when I was a kid (I was pretty anti books that seemed educational).
I’m not really asking for a technical post here on how you do it, just gushing. I love it. I love those books. You’re my favorite author – I’ve reread all your books many times. Thanks for writing and putting your books out there for us to enjoy <3
Thank you, but I probably will do a post on that kind of description. Technical writing stuff is what I mostly do on this blog.
I have finally committed to a webhost and started building an author website (that I should have had up about six years ago). Currently plinking away at design and trying to relearn the HTML and CSS I used to know, as well as all the changes since I last did this. Hopefully by the next one of these it’ll be ready for unveiling, with actual content instead of a cartoon sheep and an “under construction” notice.
Would that be a venturesome sheep? š
LOL! No, but it is a constructive one. Or maybe destructive, since it’s holding a chainsaw.
“Sometimes, despite all the technology available in 2060, what you really need is a live sheep.”
āUrsula Vernon