novel
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Once again, I’m thinking about layers. Not only the layers of a novel, but the layers of history. And when you’re writing a secondary world fantasy novel, these layers of history are important. To a degree. I’ve written about worldbuilding a number of times so I needn’t rehash it all here, but I had to
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I accidentally sent the last update as an email to al subscribers. Sorry about that! Or maybe not. Maybe you’d all appreciate having this in your inbox every day, but it feels excessive to me so I’ll keep them here where you can take a look at your leisure. 10 years ago, I wrote a
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The first new chapter that presents actual forward progression in the novel! It’s funny to have spent most of the month building and rebuilding the foundation of the novel, turning this humble chapel into a cathedral, adding flying buttresses and gargoyles and grand domes filled with visions of ecstasy, visions of hell, turning the dirt
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I often listen to songs on repeat while writing. There are people who may have good thoughtful reasons to explain this but I think I do it because I’m trying to capture something specific about a song. The emotion. The texture. The internal sensation of these notes playing against my bones, against my heart. I
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Last night I passed 80,000 words on this novel. When I began, I thought I was turning a 95,000 word novel into a trilogy. I remember specifically telling people that I was going to turn the original 4,000 words into 80,000 words. It’s been about five weeks since I began this novel and it would
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The chapter I wrote tonight was somehow missing from the novel until now, despite being the inciting incident of the original novel. You see, in all this writing, I somehow managed to forget the title of the novel and the whole twilight of the wolves aspect to the novel. And though that was not the
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Everyone is sick at my house and I’m reading about currencies. This isn’t super relevant to this first narrative arc but will be important to the second one. Hilariously. I’ll end up doing all this research and it will probably only find its way into twenty lines of dialogue. Though part of the underlying narrative
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Sometimes writing a novel is like assembling a puzzle but you’re missing the box that shows you the final image. You start putting pieces together and you think you’re making a lot of progress, storming through this little puzzle, only to discover that there are hundreds of pieces that fell off the table, somehow got
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I’m a big advocate of reading. Read all the time. Read everything. Some writers will tell you that they don’t read while they’re writing books or find it difficult to find the time to read while they write, but these people are babies, I’m sad to say. You should always be reading, if’n you intend
