Today, I picked up Deathless again for the first time since I finished draft 2. I’ve let it sit long enough, and it’s time to approach it again with a fresh perspective. The first step of this process is to print out the draft. This is the fun part: There it is in its entirety. …
Short stories are hard. I’ve always known that I prefer writing novels to short stories, and now that I’m trying my hand at short fiction again, I remember why. I’ve already talked about why I think it’s important for me to write short stories right now, and none of those reasons are that all the …
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” -Ray Bradbury. Bradbury knew a thing or two about writing, and he makes a good point here, but until such a time as I quit my job, I probably won’t be following his advice. Anyway, I think …
Hello! I hope everyone is having a great week so far. Now that I’m letting the second draft of Deathless sit for a while before returning to it, I’ve been doing some housekeeping here on the site. Not as exciting as writing, but I am happy to announce that the About Me page is now active!. It …
Hello all! I have exciting editing news. This afternoon I finished the second draft of my current WIP, sometimes known as Laz here on the blog. I’m happy with how it’s improved since the first draft was completed more than a year ago. Here’s some information about it: Age Group: Young Adult Genre: Post Nuke …
Throughout the long process of this first round of revisions, I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer. Unfortunately, one of those things is that I seem to have no idea how to properly use commas. Regular readers of this blog are already well aware of this, I’m sure. Consider the following example from …
A close friend recently asked me how I manage to be a writer. This is a very vague question, but when I asked her to elaborate, I found it was really a question about time management. I’ll paraphrase it as, “How do you have time to attempt to launch a writing career, given everything that’s …
Over the course of working on Laz, I’ve come to learn a lot about myself as a writer. One of those things is that sometimes I have the attention span of a goldfish. This is particularly dangerous when conducting research. Research is usually necessary for writing fiction novels. Writers are bound to run into topics …
Something that I’ve been seeing a lot lately is “Said is Dead” meaning that a writer shouldn’t use “said” when writing dialogue and instead use something from a provided list of extravagant dialogue tags that some blogger put together. I disagree with this. “Said” has become the go-to word in dialogue for a reason. When …
Editing update: I’ve finally finished my first readthrough of my book. Here’s What it looks like. Reading it all the way through was a more difficult task than I anticipated. The huge number of mistakes and areas of bad writing don’t make for smooth reading, especially when I have to stop each time I find …