fiction
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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
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I want this novel to be more than great. I want it to be the best novel I’ve ever written. The best novel you’ve ever read. I want this novel to become a monument to those who read it and a touchstone they can carry for all their days. And so though I rushed to
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Writing poetry and songs is devilish work. Takes a long time. A good long time and moves slow. Writing a single verse might take me a whole hour. And it’s a funny kind of hour because I know I’ll likely have to rewrite that verse a handful of times before the novel’s ready. And a
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I have ignored the frame narrative of this novel too long. I had hoped to just write the story of Sao’s childhood and then return to the frame, but there’s too much interaction between the frame and the story being told about the past. And now it’s beginning to cause a problem that I ignored
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For nearly a decade, I’ve been increasingly interested in games and the development of games, and so games often now come out in my novels. Today I got to write about an invented game in this new novel. And I just find that fun. But adding onto what I wrote yesterday, this is all a
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We’re in the final days of the kickstarter for my illustrated sword & sorcery novel The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker! If you’ve been on the fence about backing, it’s time to choose a side, my friends! The campaign officially ends on August 7th at 1:03pm CST, which gives you just over two days from
