advice

Small Epiphanies

January 5, 2012

Last February, I was a participant at the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I met lots and lots of people, but three people in particular: Katharine “Kit” Kerr, Alex Tillson, and Clint Talbert. Though it would probably surprise at least two of them to hear it, all three of them led me to great epiphanies [...]

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Ripe Ideas and Low-Hanging Fruit

November 28, 2011

“Low-hanging fruit” is a common metaphor you’ll hear in writing circles, in reference to coming up with ideas. The lowest-hanging fruit on any tree are the easiest ones to reach and therefore the ones that get picked first. For writers, the metaphor usually suggests that the ideas you come up with first, or most easily, [...]

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Measuring Up – by Guest Blogger J. Daniel Sawyer

March 29, 2010

Today’s guest post comes from J. Daniel Sawyer, podcaster and author. His short fiction will be appearing in the upcoming anthology “The Pod Complex: A Dragon Moon Press Podthology,” featuring some of the best short stories in speculative podcast fiction, forthcoming in April 2010. If you can’t wait that long, and you shouldn’t, go to [...]

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Life Happens

November 19, 2009

Monday, I lamented the sort of plot that’s all about life happening to a hapless protagonist. The fact is, sometimes life happens to all of us, and circumstances arise beyond our control in ways that leave us to pick up the pieces. It’s wearying to a reader if you try to make it an entire [...]

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Challenging the “future”

March 16, 2009

In one of my posts a while back, I said that when you build your world and your setting, you need to keep your technology consistent or keep it plausible. It doesn’t have to be both, but it must be one or the other. In science fiction, it’s most common for writers to adopt metric [...]

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Good Parts and Other Parts

January 26, 2009

When you first get the idea for a story, there are certain plot elements and scenes that spring to mind. Sometimes they’re pivotal moments. Sometimes they’re just fun moments. Regardless, they’re the moments you most want to write. Some writers will do these scenes first, then drop them into place with a little refining when [...]

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Professional Opinions

December 1, 2008

This morning, I went for a haircut. It wasn’t a very good haircut. It was mediocre, maybe, at best. The problem I had with it was that my stylist didn’t want to express any opinions. I would say, “I’d kind of like a change. I’m thinking about doing this, but I’m not sure how it [...]

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We type, ergo…

November 3, 2008

If you work at a computer for eight hours a day for a large company, in a large office, there’s probably an ergonomics consultant or coach, or at least a set of standards that the company conforms to, in order to make sure that workstations are set up in such a way that they foster [...]

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Work, and groundwork

October 23, 2008

Time is money, and that’s something you feel keenly when you go into business for yourself. Whether you’re a writer, an editor, a designer, or a freelancer in any other field. Your first priority, when you’re starting up, is to get work. You’re probably still doing something else full-time, whether it’s some kind of schooling [...]

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Think globally, write locally?

October 20, 2008

Several years ago, I had the good fortune to attend a talk given by one of the top editors in the children’s lit field. In it, he discussed the decision that had been made to Americanize a very popular series of books written by a prominent British author. The reason, he had said, was so [...]

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