My goal for 2019 is to spend 1,460 hours working on first draft material, spread across my fiction, my PhD, and some projected non-fiction features I’m looking at for the blog. This largely equates to twenty-eight hours of drafting every week, or approximately 4 hours a day. If I’m right in my estimates, this should […]
With the Warhol Sleeping draft in the bag, I get to start a new project this week. It’s not a NaNoWriMo project, despite being started on November 1, because my current process is spectacularly ill-suited to doing NaNo. In fact, it’s one of those batshit crazy approaches that works for me in my current situation, […]
EVIL ROBOT MONKEY is a short story by Mary Robinette Kowal, available for free on her website (in html, PDF, and audio) and included in her short collection, Word Puppets. It’s a little over 900 words long (or 6 minutes of audio); a complete story in a single scene, and it’s one of the best pieces […]
Conversations about narrative structure often focus their attention on the macro level: here is the three act structure; here is what needs to happen at the midpoint; here is how you nail the ending. Rarely do they spend a lot of time looking at the microstructure of individual scenes, beyond some very perfunctory (albeit important) […]
Last year, my friend Kevin opened a can of worms a while back when he started a Facebook thread about the Rebel’s retreat from Hoth in Empire Strikes Back, suggesting it should be thought of as a win. The rebels were beaten, he argued, but they’re a guerrilla force up against a considerably larger and more […]
Some days it sucks you in, the magic of this writing gig, even when you sit and work in a place patently unsuited to magic. Right now, I’m in the small food court underneath the Queens Plaza mall. It’s not yet ten o’clock and the vendors are still warming up for the day. The girl […]
I’m bedding in some new routines at the moment, trying to figure out ways to work smarter rather than harder. This is a response to the way current life-events are affecting my perspective around my projects, asking me to redefine what can be construed as a success outcome for a project or “a good day’s […]
The interesting thing about writing is the sheer amount of craft that goes into a single moment. Stories tend to climax when a major character makes an important decision – Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer and uses the force, or Katniss Everdeen refuses to play by the rules of the Hunger Game and […]
I’ve spent a large chunk of my life teaching principles from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: the differences between flat and round characters; “the king died, and then the queen died” is a story, but “the king died, then the queen died of grief” is a plot. I never had to read the book, […]
I started a new story this week, the first in a series of novelettes featuring dinosaurs, time rifts, orangutans, and a ’77 Holden Monaro that has definitely seen better days. It’s the first time in ages that I’ve attempted to write a story without planning it, and the guiding words for the story are “short, […]
If there’s a pattern in my writing routine that remains unassailable, it’s this: Thursdays are the hardest days of the week. It’s rare that I get a day where writing is the sole thing I’m doing – there is always thesis work, and meetings, things that need doing for GenreCon and spending time with my […]
New writers are often told to ignore the market and focus on writing what they love. It’s solid enough advice, for what it’s worth, but I think there’s a flipside to that. At some point, no matter what the project, you need to figure out how to love what you’re writing. There are probably writers […]
