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 …
Superheroes. I think that word alone can cause 90% of potential readers to make up their minds about what the story should be like. Let me leave some advice here: If you plan on reading Renegades, drop whatever expectation you might have. A typical comic-book-turned-novel this is not. Here’s the synopsis: Secret Identities. Extraordinary Powers. …
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 …
The editing process has begun! After about a month of not writing, and reading several different things, I’ve decided that it’s time to dive back into this book and work towards a second draft. I started by printing it out, which was the most satisfying thing I’ve done as a writer. Behold: It’s real! I …
NOTE: As per usual, I will include as few spoilers as I can manage in this post. If you think you might like to read this book and haven’t yet, you’re safe here. Let’s get right to it. Here’s the (awesome) cover. And here’s the synopsis. Emmett Atwater isn’t just leaving Detroit; he’s leaving Earth. …
Big update here: I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finally finished the rough draft of my book. That’s right, Laz has reached the stage where if it were to be read, beginning to end, the reader might consider it to be a book. I feel like I didn’t emphasize the “rough” part of rough draft …
A while back I wrote this post, in which I discuss all the different things that I listen to at one time or another while I write. At the moment, I’m all about the music, especially anything by Alt-J. Can’t get enough of that weirdness. Here’s a link to their rendition of House of the …
Today I’m going to address something that is currently helping me out immensely in continuing my rough draft of Laz: Writing scenes out of order. If you have experience in writing novels, you may be thinking well, duh, but writing out of order was something that I was dead set against when I first started …
I bought a new desk! Here it is. (Forgive the low quality image.) You’ll notice that it isn’t cluttered. This will change, I assure you. While shopping for this desk, it occurred to me that the one that I left back in Massachusetts was the original “Cluttered Desk” which is the header image on this …
It seems that I write this post every few months now, an excuse or explanation of why I haven’t been writing. This time, the difference is that there’s no apology attached, to myself or anyone else. I haven’t written in the past few months because I have truly been unable to. My life has seen …