books
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Writing poetry to last the ages is likely a fool’s errand and it’s really slowed me down immensely, so I think I’m going to set it aside and keep working my way through the prose of this novel so that I can dive into the new chapters and keep the novel moving. The songs can…
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My writing advice to anyone out there is to not do what I’m about to describe. If you’re already deep into a novel, don’t add a new character to the core cast who needs to be written into most of the book. I no longer remember when I realized this character was missing from the…
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On a recent podcast appearance, I brought up Patrick Rothfuss a few times. More than that, I mentioned that I’m making a study of his two novels. There are reasons that go into this beyond the writing of a novel that I may get into someday, but much of this concept of layering that I’ve…
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And so we’re back at it, discovering little holes here and there where wind whistles through. Part of my writing process is dropping little seeds here and there, somewhat chaotically, somewhat randomly, and so only just now did I realize that I planted a seed for a very important worldbuildy chapter, but I never picked…
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Between mid August and early September, I wrote about 30,000 words of short stories set in two separate Sword & Sorcery worlds of my own creation. I have some other stories planned in both of those worlds as well, and then I’ll turn them into two short story collections, probably next year. Most of those…
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Something Charles Dickens does extremely well is use stock characters in complex ways. The usefulness of a stock character is that it makes them immediately pop off the page and stick in your eyes and ears. Stock characters get a bad reputation because they lack complexity. Which is all fine and good and true. But…
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It’s been over a month since I looked at my novel. I stepped away to write some short stories–one of which has already been accepted and will be published soon–and then a whole lot of other things happened in my September. But I’m back at it and I’m hoping to be finished with this first…
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Often time away from a novel can be as useful as time spent on the novel, or at least it often feels that way for me. When I’m deep into the heart and meat of a novel, typing away for hours, it never really and truly leaving my thoughts, I get a bit trapped inside…
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I’m doing the tricky thing, which is making me flex my old poet muscles. I’m 100k words into this novel and I can fly by on the keyboard when I’m writing prose, but then I hit a brick wall of needing to write a poem, where a single stanza can take me an hour or…
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Sometimes I write with my eyes closed. My eyes hurt lately. I’m one prone to fear so I always assume I’m going blind or have brain cancer or something, but the truth is that I think I’m just getting sleep and also not getting enough sleep. So I close my eyes and write for paragraphs…
