Tweet This week I’ve been talking about my experience with National Novel Writing Month in 2007. Thursday featured a big bragging story about my 120,000-word month, and yesterday I gave some useful advice about how to handle too much of a good thing. Nobody’s really coming here looking for advice about that, though, are they? […]
Tweet I talked yesterday about my amazingly successful first NaNoWriMo — in terms of word count, anyway. It’s hard for me to give myself too much credit for the book, though. It’s still in its first draft state, and sitting in limbo as the third book in a four-part series that’s still missing a decent […]
Tweet Last week I haunted you all with threats of the pending National Novel Writing Month, stating a little prematurely that “Next month, you’re going to write a novel.” I watched (and even commented on) your public reactions to that claim, and some of you were rightly terrified at the time investment looming oh-so-near. Others […]
Tweet Hmm…I seem to have started something of a panic among those of you who already know NaNoWriMo. Take a deep breath. You’ve got a month and a half still before you’re even supposed to start. I started discussing it now for those who haven’t done it before, though. It can take some convincing, especially […]
Tweet Yesterday I explained why you need to know the plot points in your work-in-progress. If you use them right, they can make your story easier to tell and for more compelling to read. Design a Plot Point Like most aspects of writing, all that power and convenience while you’re writing comes directly from the […]
Tweet Yesterday I told a story about my rites of passage, about the moments in my life when I grew up. They were turning points in my personal history, and both of them significantly changed my plot. Today I want to tell you a little bit about the ways writers capture that slice of the […]
Tweet I’ve talked before about arguments I lost to my dad (the expert debater) back in high school. I can vividly remember the last of those. Well…not the last argument I lost to my dad (which is, God willing, still many, many years in the future), but the last argument I lost in high school. […]
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…
I made a fake image in Photoshop–my fantasy world map hanging above the mantle in a fancy frame–and it reveals a surprising amount about document templates.
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.
