Achillean Romance with Fangs
Aka, stop shaming people for liking stories that aren’t literary perfection, dammit. Literature is an art. What different people like from their art varies. We could make arguments for whether that means there’s true perfection in it at all, but for the sake of this thread we’ll assume that there’s a set of things a […]
Also known as: a thing I want to say to readers, reviews, writers, and most importantly, myself. Some facts about OUR BLOODY PEARL: I self-published it 16 months ago It’s the second book I ever wrote It’s the first book I ever edited to completion It’s the first anything I ever published Another fact: It’s […]
NaNoWriMo — also known as Nation Novel Writing Month, the month were writers everywhere attempt to write… well, a novel. The actual goal is to write 50,000 words by the end of the month, because 50,000 words is usually seen as the minimum word count acceptable for something to be considered a novel, even though […]
It’s that time of year again—by which I mean flu vaccination season! Vaccines are often a hot topic, and the mechanics behind them can be complicated for those untrained in the biological sciences. But everyone deserves to know what’s happening . So without further ado, here’s answers to some common questions about vaccinations, conveyed metaphor […]
Sometimes I feel like my writing ability is barely edging forward—that if my skill is growing, it’s only doing so under the surface. But then I look at the difference in the same basic scene I wrote in my first novel and in my fifth, and it’s breathtaking. In the first, a young woman discovers […]
First off, you have to know these two things: Your first draft of your first book will be terrible. All your favorite authors of all time wrote a terrible first draft of their first book too. Probably a terrible second and third draft, maybe even a terrible second and third book. This is okay. It can […]
If you want to write as a career you’ll have to write on days you don’t want to. You’ll have to write when you aren’t motivated, when you aren’t in the mood, when writing isn’t any fun. Just because writing is something people can have fun doing, doesn’t mean it’s not a challenging and often tiresome career choice. Just as […]
As I’ve grown as a writer, one unexpected change in the way I view and critique other stories is that I no longer see stories on a scale of good to bad, but from finished to unfinished. There are rarely ‘bad’ stories, only stories that needed more work to reach their true potential: stories that needed faster […]
(A continuation of the feverish analysis in this post.) Let’s now consider a reader who has no idea what an elephant is. We the writer want to present our reader with words aligned in just the right way that we paint a picture of an elephant that will let the reader perfectly imagine it exactly as we […]
(And why I stopped querying my novel.) As some of you know, I was querying Iron From Fire on and off from March through May, and I recently decided to quit, despite it being overall a good story written in what one editor described as ‘on par’ for the genre. And I think it’s important to talk […]
