Because Something Strange and Deadly has ghosts and walking corpses, I was recently asked, “How do you write a scary scene?” So I sat down and thought about what makes a scene scary–how I crafted the frightening bits and what I find scariest in movies/books. I’m sure there are better posts out there that discuss […]
Ah, my dear readers, I’m in need of some inspiration. What direction should I head with future blog posts? Do all you wonderful readers and writers like what I’ve talked about so far? What kind of stuff would you like to see more of? These were the deep questions I pondered into the wee hours […]
Life threw me for a loop when I lost 153 pages, so out of revenge, I’m throwing life for a loop. Every few days, I switch my plants around, so the sun hits them at a different angle. The result? Zig-zagging plants. Mwu-hahahaha. I’m so evil…but not really. ~~~~ “When we’re done with it, we […]
When you first begin writing, you do it for various reasons… Maybe it’s an escape. Maybe it’s for entertainment. Maybe it’s because if you didn’t you would just die. Whatever the reason, it gets your butt into a chair and your fingers onto a keyboard. As you BICHOK away, you may or may not finish […]
Note: this post is (sort of) a continuation of If It Doesn’t Fit, Don’t Force It, and When the Glass Isn’t Half-Full. A few people have asked how I managed to get my writing “swing” back, and I gave a brief rundown in the comments last week. I thought I’d go into a tad more […]
Once upon a time, there was a really beautiful girl with LOTS of money. Her name was Susan, and she was super popular. Everyone wanted to be her, but she was nice, so everyone liked her too. She fell in love with a handsome Frenchman. Oh, and she could fly and turn invisible. Oh! And […]
Last Friday’s QOTW was about avoiding a contrived plot. At the time, I took this to mean a copy-cat plot, but the responses of Mandy and Julie made me see what the question could have meant: how do you avoid a forced plot — a turn of events in the story that doesn’t feel natural. […]
I recently read (but failed to finish) an ARC for a book attracting a ton of hype. I won’t name the book, but I was really disappointed… I had high hopes for this upcoming young adult novel, but alas, my hopes were dashed! My main problem was that I could not connect to the story. […]
Steampunk. A genre, a style, a community, a branch of speculative fiction… Like the well-worn quote about porn, “You just know it when you see it.” Of course, to even have that recognition skill, you’ve got to first be introduced. Steampunk started with steam — no surprise there right? Steam engines, Victorian England, and inventions […]
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 Orson Scott Card’s Character & Viewpoint has a lot packed into a few pages. He takes you from the first stages of character development (i.e. what makes a character? how do we create them?) to fully fleshed-out character creation (i.e. types of characters, emotional stakes, and believability), and he […]