I love words. I love experimenting with them. My favorite author is E.A. Poe because he uses familiar words in ways I never thought of. I was blown away by Prince of Thorns because the language was gritty; it had a bite to it- same with Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewels and Ephemera series. I…
Writers don’t read we study. We learn the craft by analyzing what’s been done before. I read this often when I was first learning to write but never how do this. I, eventually, learned how to pick a story apart through my literature classes as an undergrad. So, to hopefully save you some confusion, I…
Picturing the when of my story has become complicated or maybe I’m making it more complicated than it actually is. Every event is set but I can’t see them in any sort of order. I tried to write them out list form but it didn’t help. So, I tried another approach. I never wrote down…
I know naming comes with the job description but man, is it difficult. It’s harder than writing the story and editing it. When creating a world, you sometimes need a new name for everything- cities, villages, races, stores, houses, rooms, professions- everything. On top of that, you can’t name your characters something normal without a…
Whenever I read or watch fantasy, I’m always impressed with the names; whether it’s a character, a race of creatures or a place. I always wonder how the writer came up with such great and creative names that fit so perfectly into each story. As I said in my previous post, Characters, Powers and Too…
As I said in Novel Planning, I’d no desire to turn any story into a series but then I thought about it. A series is perfect because my characters in three different drafts, Feast, Isolated, and Nothing, are of the same race and the stories all have the same themes. I didn’t even do it…
I’m terrified of losing a copy of any one of my stories so, along with saving them on my computer, an external hard drive and a SD card, I save them on a flash drive and carry that around with me. I try not the use the flash drive often but I’d saved a class…
So where do my story ideas come from? Everywhere is the most obvious answer and it’s true, but I’d like to be a bit more specific. It’s a stretch to call them ideas because my stories are born more from a scene or an image. A couple of years ago, I remember vaguely my brother…
Awhile ago, I lost sight of what I said in the post Why I write. Writing stopped being therapeutic. It felt far too much like work. This is no longer the case but then, it became harder and harder to actually sit in front of my computer or before a journal and give my characters…
(I’ve been so focused on school, graduation and working on my novel that I totally neglected my blog this week. I need to balance everything so nothing falls between the cracks.) I hit another snag while editing one of my novels- I can’t believe how many holes this one has and I started and…
