The Limits of Outlining
I tend to be an outliner but these have their limits as I discovered when working on the latest Kormak short story. I’ve had half this tale sitting on my hard drive for years. I really liked the opening but I could never find a way of making the story work. I got myself into a real tangle by introducing an interesting new character with a big backstory and then not really knowing what to do with her. Frustrated, I put the story away and just left it. A couple of weeks back I decided I was going to finish Read more…
Everything Counts in Small Amounts
A long while back I wrote about how even a 1% change in productivity adds up over the course of a year when you write thousands of words a day. It’s something that has been on my mind, off and on, ever since. I’ve been thinking that you don’t need to write thousands of words a day for small changes to make a difference. For example, writing 100 extra words a day will add 36500 words over the course of a year. That’s the first draft of a novel in under three years. (In under two years if you’re writing Read more…
The Steampunk Excerpt
Yesterday, I said I would post the first scene from my Russian steampunk novel complete with my editorial notes. Alas the fickle finger of fate has intervened. Scrivener has crashed seven times on me since yesterday, which is more than it has crashed during the whole period since I started using it back in 2007. Since the only file that crashes is the one for this particular story, I am tempted to conclude that this might have something to do with Scapple importing. That might be jumping to conclusions prematurely though. Something else may have corrupted the file. The net Read more…
Day One, Scene One, Chapter One
So I started work on the first scene of the first chapter of my Russian steampunk novel. I got eight hundred words or so done. It was initially a disappointing read. It lacked the the richness, power and drama I thought it would contain when I conceived the scene. This is normal. For me, it’s how the transition from imagination to prose often works. In my mind, I had a picture of a landscape somewhere between Dore’s illustrations of 19th century London slums and Miyazaki’s villages from Laputa the Flying Island. Dark satanic factories belched forth smoke and flame. Things Read more…
Scapple for Plotting
I am currently working on a murder mystery. I started with an interesting central character (a wizard detective),a setting that excites me (a magical steampunk version of nineteenth century Russia) and a strong idea (our hero has to investigate the murder of a rival he hated, one suspect being the woman he once loved). I was happily writing my outline until I came to the point where the body was discovered. At that point a red flag went up. I had no idea who committed the crime. This sort of thing happens to me a lot. I start with an Read more…
Free Stuff for NaNoWriMo
I should have known it was all going to go horribly wrong the moment I got on the plane. It wasn’t just the person on the left of me was snuffling. The person on the right was as well. As was the person in front of me and the person behind. As we took off the sounds of coughing and sneezing drowned out the engines. I could practically feel the cloud of unhealth settle on me. Father Nurgle has blessed me once more. There was not a lot of NaNoWriMoing done last week. As of yesterday I had completed 36522 Read more…
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