Recent Tips

Now Playing: YOU BE TAILS, I'LL BE SONIC by A Day to Remember
Just Read: THE WISE MAN'S FEAR by Patrick Rothfuss--Really enjoyed it. A great fantasy epic. Did you know he won the WOTF contest? I ordered it to read his winner--it's straight out of this book. Really well done.
Reading Now: A STORM OF SWORDS by George R.R. Martin

Recently, I read a pair of books about writing. One was "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott, and the second was "The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction" by Philip Athans.

They were pretty different books, but they had a few common threads:

1) Publication isn't all it's cracked up to be, and it's far from the end of your writing troubles (ie, there is no end).

2) Study people in real life. They're who you're writing about, under different names and in different places doing different things, but fiction about people who feel real is fiction worth reading.

3) Use your fiction to say something.

4) Take a step back from your writing when it's done and ask yourself if it's believable, honestly (especially F&SF).

5) The surest way to not become a writer is to give up. The surest way to become a successful writer is to never give up.

Some good advice there. I feel like I subscribe to most of it already but reading those books helped to reinforce it and refocus me. I have a longer F&SF piece in mind for my February W1S1 story, so it was nice having these tips to orient me and jump start my creativity a bit.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to the past few weeks. Hopefully this story won't be too stubborn coming out.