Ilona Andrews, the estimable urban fantasy writing team of Ilona and Gordon Andrews. They’ve done single and series stories and, if UF is your groove, their Kate Daniels and Hidden Legacy series are must-read. They also co-write a great blog,…
Category: Craft
Countersinking
In the throws of editing (yet again) a manuscript after paying for a professional editor to go over it. In the process of trimming the piece, I realized how much a countersink. Say the same thing and then say the…
WIP
Back from hiatus, and starting, edits on my second Shmuley Myers book. It builds on an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Austin police homicide detective in a world (soon to be real, apparently) where every non-birth pregnancy becomes a murder investigation, contraception is illegal, church and state prance together in an evil waltz.
Shmuley needs to balance his roles as a pious Jew, a loving husband, his job as a civil servant, and…
Cuspical Data
Last post I talked about the uncertainty of “that time” between an agent submitting a manuscript to a publisher and when a writer gets a response from the publisher in the form of a rejection or a contract. Thing the…
Trunk Novels & Research
By my count I blew five weeks and generated ~100k words on a novel I’m regretfully consigning to the metaphorical trunk. And what’s funny is that I’m sure that if this novel was written forty years ago, it’d be on…
Quick Post-Prandial on Manuscript Maintenance
I did some time-and-motion monitoring in terms of getting changes to a manuscript fit from Scrivener to Word and cleaned and ready for The Agent to use. Fine-cleaning two scenes (~2.5k words). That means reading them aloud, copying the pieces…
A Writer’s Primer on Computer Care and Feeding
We’re in the midst of National Novel Writing Month, and I’m reminded of several instances where the moan of “I just lost everything!” was heard over a coffee shop table. I’ve talked with writers who’ve lost entire manuscripts. Others that…
WWI: A Century’s Past / Veterans Day
World War I was hideously expensive and wasteful in terms of talent. A generation of young people, of talent, of possibility–gone. The hope and potential of growing their lives and cultures mowed down, gassed, and slaughtered. And that lost of…
POVs and Trunking
I’ve been wrestling with getting my next novel started before getting a full-time, paying gig. And score is trunk novels: 5, Shlomi manuscripts: 0. It kept coming across lifeless, a narration of facts and events that even extensive external and…
Hopes, Dashed
I’m already several thousand words into my latest, but had to stop for some research. More research. Interviewing dancers research. (Okay, my daughter, but still…) And then I remembered Jeanne and Spider Robinson’s book “Stardance.” Well, I actually remember the…