Tweet I started playing videogames at the age of six or seven. Within a year, I was programming them, too. Now that’s not to say I was exercising my creative genius way back then. (Not in that medium, anyway.) No, my dad had a Commodore 64 and a subscription to Compute! magazine, which came with […]
Tweet At this point, you’ve got my NaNoWriMo review, and you’ve got Courtney’s, and if you’re following any other writers’ blogs (as you probably should be), you’ve got a lot more. NaNoWriMo is all about not looking ahead, and not looking back, but just looking right at the blinking cursor at the end of your […]
Tweet November’s finally at an end. So far I’ve loved every NaNoWriMo I’ve participated in, and I’ve been intensely grateful when each one of them ended. It’s part of the process. I had a good year in 2010. That sentence is true all on its own, but I mean it here particularly as a comment […]
The infamous, oft-dreaded, murky march of NaNoWriMo Week Two is well underway. We cannot always see the path before us, and the songs are starting to fade to snatches of tune hummed nervously to the light of flickering torches…
Tweet It’s time for another post about my dad. Before we dive in, let’s have a brief review: He’s an accomplished debater, and wins every fight with sheer Dadness He’s always been a natural storyteller He spent a long time wanting to write a book, and I spent a long time telling him he should […]
Above all, the first draft of a story is meant to be an icky, gloopy mess. And when you’ve completed it, you do, indeed, have an honest-to-gobstoppers gen-yoo-ine story on your hands.
But. You still need to shape that amorphous blob of words into something approachable, let alone digestible, for anyone else. And that is where your toolbox comes in…
Last month, I spent an indeterminate, yet still large number of hours drawing trees for Julie of Julie V. Photography… The experience left me ruminating upon some of the clear parallel between my drawing craft and my writing craft. Gather ’round, my dearest inklings, and I shall share with you the wisdom the aforementioned parallel doth impart…
We of the storytelling craft often use the term “thread” when discussing the thematic elements that hold our tale together. It’s a perfect metaphor, because we do, indeed, weave those elements in and out of the plot, binding characters and events together into a unified whole. But problems arise during the weaving because we use the wrong threads…
I’ve admitted recently that I’m a little broken, but I’m getting better. After years of living with crippling anxiety, I finally started trying to improve.
Behold! The game is afoot, and The Second Draft loometh ahead, apparently precipitous but in reality more easily ascendable than its predecessor. In this, my most excellent beta reader = Mom = my climbing buddy, having scouted ahead and come back to me with a report of the obstacles and pitfalls I shall face. And so, knowing that forewarned is forearmed…
