I'm changing up my plans for NaNo. The book I want to work on, Link in the Chain, is really raring to go. The problem is that it needs a LOT of rewrites on what I have now before I can sit down to plunk out new parts. I knew this a week ago but I also have other...
TL;DR - Congrats on being a writer in an era when writers have options about how they want to become 'published'. Now go write. Okay, let's talk publishing. I'm a librarian, a text technologist, and a published author: this is something I know a lot about. [FYI, this...
It's all been done before; our jobs, as artists, is to do it all over again. When I was a young girl, I used to be obsessed with doing the thing no one has done before. This was easy to do, simply because my own knowledge and understanding of the world was accordingly...
Doing the thing you want to do is not predicated on being the best at it. It's taken me years to accept that I'm a fairly mediocre writer. Oh, I'm good -- years and years (well over "10,000 hours" by, like, a factor of a zillion) of practice will do that to you. You...
I've written before about my NaNo novel, which is a full re-write and completion (planned!) of my WIP Link in the Chain. It's expanding out from first person POV present tense to tight third person past tense, mostly because I feel I need to include more perspectives...
Like a beating drum, the call of November goes out: "You, yes YOU, can write a book!" And it's true, you can. A "book" is a variable, actually -- think of the "bible", which is filled with "books"...well, which is it? Is the bible a book? Is Genesis a "book"? It's...
If your defense of a fantasy story's whiteness is "historical accuracy", you are already wrong. The current wank about Tim Burton's flat-out racist commentary on why he was "unable" to have a more diversified cast in the Miss Peregrine movie highlights how ingrained...
I received a few grateful comments on my post about my writing "technique" (less of that than a writing "attack" but whatevs) from friends who felt encouraged by reading about someone who does not write "by the rules." Because rules are good for establishing a...
I felt like I was being held back, but the chains were self inflicted. My friend KimM calls it "ghost chains", the feeling that something is stopping you from moving forward. I'll vouch that sometimes, that's a real thing -- depression, anxiety, illness, trauma, and...