The Tower of Babel (Etemananki) has made life that much more difficult for us story lovers. We miss out on a lot of great books that never get translated overseas. We have to get our own works translated to see the broader world market. And us writers, depending on the scale of our stories, are forced to consider that people in different countries often speak different languages and use region-based dialects.

[The whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Šin'âr, and they dwelt there. (…)

And they said, "Come, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."]

Read the rest of this entry »

Merrilee Faber’s running another Novel-Push Initiative this month (Yes, she asked my permission first). 

I decided to join—It’s always fun, and I’m kind of curious to see what it’s like to participate without having to worry about everyone else’s tallies. Read the rest of this entry »

I try to remind myself that I can say something today that I couldn’t say last year, and honestly wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to say: I’m done with my first draft! I’m in the editing/revision step. How would me-one-year-ago feel if I could go into the future and read this post?

I have-to-have-to-have-to keep editing if I ever want to finish this novel, seek publication, go to places like Worldcon and World Fantasy, network and meet people, and have fun writing more novels.  And I intend to do just that. But I can’t just write ‘I need to get scene X done by date Y’. It’s never been that simple for me; conventional methods never seem to work. Read the rest of this entry »

How do you make the fantastic elements of your stories seem real?

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I was heavily discouraged by certain recent books and movies that are socially embraced and loved even though they have what I may consider bad writing.

In the end, I decided to just move on and be a little upset. And after packsister’s comments, I think we both agreed that we can only write for ourselves and not sweat the luck some of those authors seem to have.

But…I’m going to reiterate something I’ve heard recently that strikes the very core of the issue I’m having.

Gimmicks ultimately can’t compensate for bad writing.

And, with that, I’m at peace with all of this.

But what does that mean, exactly? Read the rest of this entry »

Out-of-the-blue-rant time! A rant about … vegetables? No, don’t worry. This does have something to do with writing.

Brave souls may click below to proceed. …

Read the rest of this entry »

One thing creative writing classes try to teach their students is how to mimic the styles of famous authors.

I think that’s pretty smart. After all, one way to ensure a writer can make informed decisions about the different aspects of their own writing style is to see if they can pick up on and identify the alchemy of other writers’ styles.

I’ve never taken Creative Writing, but I’m taking Lit 110 this semester. As a result, I’ve recently read some short stories that are considered ‘classics’ by the powers that be:

A & P – John Updike
Story of an Hour – Kate Chopin
A Rose for Emily – William Faulkner
A Party Down at the Square – Ralph Ellison
Everyday Use – Alice Walker
Shiloh – Bobbie Ann Mason
Araby – James Joyce
The Man Who Was Almost a Man – Richard Wright
Sweat – Zora Neale Hurston
Good Country People – Flannery O’Conner
The Guest – Albert Camus
Hills Like White Elephants – Ernest Hemingway
In the American Society – Gish Jen
Woman Hollering Creek – Sandra Cisneros
The Red Convertible – Louise Erdrich

I’ll admit I have little patience for old movies and less patience still for old, archaic prose.
To make matters worse, a good portion of the stories featured irritating dialogue, where the writers tried to phonetically transcribe ‘slack-jawed’ or other variant dialect, which made reading them horribly laborious.

But a few were pleasant surprises, such as Araby and The Guest. And every one of these authors had radically different styles, so it was kinda fun to pick up their quirks and nuances while reading.

The point of all this is I tried rewriting the ending to Mr. Updike’s short story, A & P (circa 1930), mimicking his style as best as I could.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you may have noticed I axe’d all my Wordpress.com pages when I converted this blog over to the style of my main page.

Now you might be thinking: “Oh no! What about the character and location pages?” *fingerbite-fingerbite*

Don’t worry. The pages have all been retained on my hard drive, and can still be accessed on my old blog.

Truth is, I’ve had plans to redo them a bit more /professionally/ to help preserve the snootiness of a .COM presense.

The first outcome of this diabolical plan is a new ’About the Author‘ page, also accessible from the main page by clicking on ‘about’. 

You may notice that empty square to the right of the blurb—That’s the spot where I want to add one of those infamous black & white ‘really serious author’ photos of myself.

Even though the passage turned out a little tongue-and-cheek, it still feels (somewhat) more professional. I hope it effectively answers all the questions someone might wonder about me, and I’m glad it doesn’t leave me as horribly stalkerbait-naked and vulnerable as my previous one did. 

Other pages will come in time, but I think the ‘Random Fantasy Clichés‘ page can *ahem* fall to the wayside. As fun as RFCs may be, perhaps they were best kept to myself. :P

I finally got done with “Big Blue”, a short story written from a woman’s perspective and heavy on the dialogue. It packs some emotional punch, but it’s not high fantasy. It’s present day stuff.

Still, I might enter it somewhere and see how well it performs. If anybody would like to give my first draft a read, I’d love whatever criticism you can offer. And if anybody knows of a good writing contest, that would be most helpful as well.

Oh, by the way, I’m still waiting to hear back on “En Prise” the short story I submitted late last year. :P

My fingers are growing sick of being crossed all the time.

Later, taters.

As I’ve been writing scenes and posting wordcounts, I’ve gotten away from something important: How did I come up with this stuff, anyway?
After all, wasn’t the whole point of this blog to share the creative writing process?

“Where is your story supposed to start, really?” is one of the toughest questions to answer. Some people try to oversimplify the answer.

Holly Lisle is one of those people. “Beginnings are endings,” she says. She believes that beginnings always present the protagonists with problems they are ill-equipped to handle. The ending should be just like the beginning, only the protagonists should’ve learned over the course of the story how to properly deal with those exact same problems. If that’s not the case, she suggests you might’ve started at the wrong place. Makes sense, right?

But I don’t buy it. My favorite stories usually raise the stakes until the protagonists are faced with much more difficult problems than they could’ve ever imagined at the beginning. Characters change. Emotionally, mentally, and physically.

While they’re travelling, the world around them shouldn’t stay static, either. It changes and grows.

Imagine a story where a boy, who gets kicked around by a bully, stumbles through a portal in his school locker to a magical land where he learns how to fight and stand up for himself. Then, when he returns back to his world all ready to kick some butt, it turns out the bully slipped on soap in the shower and died. lol. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s so many words. Sooo many. I come across words I’m not 100% sure of the meaning of every day. It’s kind of pathetic — I pick up a book, I read a few lines, then I have to put down the book in order to look up a word or phrase I wasn’t sure of.

I mean, sure, I might’ve heard these words before, but I can’t rely solely on context clues to define words I might have to use when I write. Guesswork could end up making me look like a total idiot.

Some words are just silly — words that end up making the author sound stupid, like he’s trying too hard to sound scholarly, or like he’s exploiting the built-in thesaurus feature in Microsoft Word. Fortunately, I can tell the difference, and I can do without those. Read the rest of this entry »

The location page got a hefty update. The characters page got a minor one (I’m going to update that more, soon). Since I came up with a lot of those names on-the-fly, feedback is most definitely welcome. Especially if anything I named there also happens to be the name of a rare foot disease, or whatever.

Anyway, the next scene is when I start to coordinate the groups of characters I’ve introduced.

There’s traditional Shiirati music as a backdrop; heavy rhythmic drum beats echoing through the city due to the festivites.

There’s Cauinn—along with nearly the entire population of the city—at the Feast of the Eight. She still has Cirellio’s lock of hair and is waiting patiently for him.

There’s the guards patrolling every city street.

There’s Cirellio sneaking through the city.   Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, I was feeling down. But I tried to turn a negative into something positive by making a goal-oriented checklist that day.

Now, I’m feeling much better. So let’s see how I did:

X - Challenge 1: Argue with that little voice inside my head that keeps telling me I’ve no business writing a novel.

I haven’t been feeling insecure about my writing at all. In fact, I keep surprising myself with what’s pouring from my fingertips.

X - Challenge 2: Find time for my book. My free time just isn’t cutting it. Not even close. Whenever I get geared up for writing, something always seems to come up that demands my immediate attention. So I suppose I have to make time by sacrificing something, somehow.

While I still don’t have much time for my book, it’s true that I tend to squander my time if I have a lot of it, whereas I make the most of my time when I don’t have much. Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! probably says it best. Read the rest of this entry »

Prologue-

1. a preliminary discourse; a preface or introductory part of a discourse, poem, or novel.
2. an introductory speech, often in verse, calling attention to the theme of a play.
3. the actor or actress who delivers this.
4. an introductory scene, preceding the first act of a play, opera, etc.
5. any introductory proceeding, event, etc.: Appetizing delicacies were the prologue to a long dinner.
–verb (used with object) 6. to introduce with or as if with a prologue.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everyone. I want to be honest. I’m not feeling very good about my writing at the moment.
So I’ve created a list of challenges. Read the rest of this entry »

(Yay! This is my 60th post. We’re also on the threshold of 5,000 hits. What a milestone on both counts. Thanks, all! ^_^)

Before I get too much further with writing scenes, I’d like to talk a little bit more about plot structure.

The plot is an unruly beast. There are many theories as to why a story works, or how to combine various elements to make the “ultimate plot combination”. The number of possible plot types is hotly debated, but it’s a growing list. We’re not talking about some sacred list that only adds a new plot once every 1000 years; Something like sixteen more have been added just within the last 100 years. So don’t listen to those old codgers that claim ‘everything under the sun has been done’, just like how inventors in the past always managed to invent new things, despite their stuffy compatriots claiming everything under the sun had already been invented. You CAN write something new.

Anyway, I feel lucky to have stumbled upon what I feel is a cool trick to writing good plots. (If it’s widely known info, forgive me. It’s definitely not widely known at my on-line stomping grounds, nor is it mentioned in any of my ‘how-to’ reading materials.)

But before I talk about that, I want to reiterate something->
I’m sure you’ve all seen Syd Field’s three-act plot structure. But just in case you haven’t, here they are (in my own words): Read the rest of this entry »

Once I had a beginning and ending worked out, it was time to decide upon length. According to many sources, a salable, entry-level high fantasy novel should aim for 80k to 120k words.

So how do you know how many words you are going to write? Unfortunately, there’s no (immediately apparent) hard and fast rules for hitting a target word-length. There’s no “average length for a chapter” either, because chapters end and begin for all sorts of different reasons. A 120,000 word novel can have 30 chapters, and an 80,000 word novel can just as easily have 50. I even read about an avant-garde writer that made one of his chapters a single sentence.

None-the-less, I tried bridging the beginning of the book to the end using chapter titles and brief descriptions of what happens in each of them. I failed miserably. I was only able to make it to chapter twelve before I got stuck.

There was still a massive gorge between the beginning and end of my book. I needed to build a better bridge to help get the reader (and myself) across. Read the rest of this entry »

As I created Lura, I kept the story in mind. I even wrote my own creation story and could more or less visualize its geologic history.

So then comes plot. They say writing a plot for a novel is easier than for a short story. Heh. I don’t think the person that said that had high fantasy in mind. They say selling a novel is easier than selling a short story, too. But I digress.

The first thing to do was to figure out the beginning and the ending. I tried to play off the characters, their histories, and the world itself. I thought about how I’d like the characters to develop. I tried to make every character ’round’. (Bad, but simple example: If your main character is the ‘ultimate badass’, what kind of experiences could lead to that? After all, s/he probably wasn’t born one.) Thinking about all of those things should reveal some kind of theme, too. That theme should be the focus of the story, which should hopefully reveal some idea for a story arc. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, I’m aware of the bad grammar of the title ^_^;

“At the beginning of next month, I’ll see if I can’t get this sucker published in a real magazine.”

Well, it’s the beginning of next month, and indeed, we shall see.

As you may recall, I’ve tried to get a few things published in the past but they all were met with failure. My first attempt was entering my first short story, ‘An Escape from Reality’, in a contest at my college back in late March.

When submitting something, I guess you have to follow the directions exactly or your work’ll end up somewhere far worse than a slush-pile.

Rules were: Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, I’m aware of the bad grammar of the title ^_^;

“At the beginning of next month, I’ll see if I can’t get this sucker published in a real magazine.”

Well, it’s the beginning of next month, and indeed, we shall see.

As you may recall, I’ve tried to get a few things published in the past but they all were met with failure. My first attempt was entering my first short story, ‘An Escape from Reality’, in a contest at my college back in late March.

When submitting something, I guess you have to follow the directions exactly or your work’ll end up somewhere far worse than a slush-pile.

Rules were: Read the rest of this entry »