So the first draft of The Far West is done at last, turned in a bit over two weeks ago, and I’m past the first walking-around-in-a-daze bit where I spend all my time feeling as if I ought to be finishing the book and then remembering that
Read more →Once again, I am late on a book. This time, it’s a combination of things: first off, I didn’t count on how much time handling my Dad’s taxes would take this year; second off, I didn’t count on yet another family crisis involving meeting with lawyers and
Read more →I’ve talked more than once about the Big Three – plot, characterization, and setting. They started off as the earliest writing advice I recall getting (and I wish I could remember the name of the writer who told me that, so I could credit him properly), as
Read more →When would-be writers ask “where do you get your ideas?” they are often asking the wrong question. They’re struggling to get started on a story, but they’re not actually starting from scratch. They have an idea. It’s just not enough to go on with yet. So what these
Read more →First things first: a bit over two weeks ago, our own Michelle Wood emailed me that she’s done a wonderful video trailer for the Frontier Magic series. I’ve been planning to put a link to it on the website, but I’m in the downhill rush to finish
Read more →I’m in what I hope is the downhill stretch of The Far West at last. I have finally gotten my characters out of town and moving, and yesterday I got to what was supposed to be a throwaway bit at their first stop, just a little bit
Read more →One of the things that happens when you write books that are marketed as Young Adult or childrens is, you get letters from kids who have been assigned to write them in class. It’s really obvious, for two reasons: first, the number of letters drops off markedly
Read more →As regular readers of this blog may remember, a couple of months back I realized I’d gotten partway into the third of the Frontier Magic books and realized that I’d gotten the events in the wrong order. Not “wrong” in the sense that I’d gotten cause and effect reversed
Read more →I wrote my first novel, Shadow Magic, in what I now call “sloppy omniscient viewpoint.” Most of the time, a given scene would have a “viewpoint character,” but whenever I thought someone else’s thoughts or feelings were more interesting, I just jumped into that character’s head for
Read more →As you may recall, dear reader, in our last exciting episode on Wednesday morning I stated categorically that I wouldn’t be doing NaNoWriMo this year for a lot of good reasons, including house guests, Thanksgiving, and general life workload. November-December are supposed to be slow months for work,
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