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
Read more →One of the things I hate writing the most is what I refer to as “council scenes.” These are the scenes that involve a bunch of characters who are trying to solve a problem (or series of problems) by talking them to death, rather than bashing something
Read more →Scene choreography or planning is a thing that some writers do up front, some do as a routine part of their process, and some hardly ever bother with even though they’re not pantsers, strictly speaking. What I’m talking about here is a whole class of preparation variously
Read more →When most people think about revising a manuscript, they think about one of two things: polishing up the style, grammar, syntax, and so on, or making fixes where something was unclear, unexplained, or just missing. Revising does all of that, of course, but in addition, there’s almost
Read more →Back in July, I talked about Messing Around With Post-Its when I was three chapter into the novel, and came up with a plan for the next two or three chapters. This is an update on how that worked, and why. As a refresher, I had arranged
Read more →As I mentioned last post, I’m three chapters into the WIP with a not-too-urgent but nonetheless looming deadline and have discovered a need for some more development before I continue. There are two sorts of work I need to do: macro-level and micro-level. The macro-level stuff is
Read more →Lurker, I’ll get to your crowd post next. Every so often, I am reminded that not everyone lives in Minnesota. I was reminded of this forcibly a few years back at a fabulous Minicon panel at which five editors graciously consented to, in essence, read slush for
Read more →I have this new project, which I have been wrestling with for a couple of months now. Mostly pleasant wrestling, as there are a lot of elements that please me. The problem is, I couldn’t get the thing started. This is extremely unusual for me, but it
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