All posts tagged: authors

The Importance of Checking Boxes

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(Or: How I start a novel, Agile-style.) So as I am hitting the ‘send’ button on sending two manuscripts off to my agent, I am naturally planning my next book. As one does. And I thought it might be interesting, if not helpful, to go over what I do and why. Because at heart, I will always be a project manager. I have to do this because I have ADHD. However, long before I was diagnosed with such, I’d learned coping mechanisms that allow me to function to varying degrees of success. (My closets are still filled with craft projects I have thrown myself into with obsessive gusto and then abandoned several weeks later, but at least I know why that happens now.) One of the best methods (for me) is the satisfying feeling of accomplishment that comes from checking a box as ‘done.’ (Similarly, moving a task from column A to column B.) If I can break it down into a small task and put it on a list, there is a much, much …

Wandering in with a Starbuck’s Cup

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Hey, what’s up? So…it’s been uh *checks the calendar* three years. Wow, it really has been three years. Okay…so I guess I haven’t been updating, have I? All right, let’s do this. What’s been going on in my life? The obvious answer, as it has been the obvious answer for everything, is “living in the age of active pandemic.” Which has been heartbreaking on many levels, not least of which because it turns out that ‘I told you so’ stops being a lot of fun when millions of people have died. On a personal level? I finished a five-book epic fantasy series for Tor Books. Yeah, that’s right. That baby is DONE. The last book in the series, The Discord of Gods, comes out on April 26th (which means you have not missed your chance to pre-order!) It’s a tremendous accomplishment and a strange feeling of loss all the same time. Because it’s not just that I’ve written four books in the last three years (each over 200,000 words), but I have been involved with …

Reviews: Books on Writing

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Over the holidays and into the new year, I’ve been reading two books on the craft of writing itself: Dwight Swain’s Techniques for the Selling Writer and Stephen King’s On Writing. Dwight Swain’s book is pretty old, a bit hard to find, and honestly I’d never heard of it before I started to wonder why YWriter (my program of choice of late for book writing) had some of the special features it does for action and reaction scenes and the like. I wasn’t quite sure what to think of Dwight Swain’s book at first: it’s pretty clearly meant for pulp writing and some of the advice seems better suited to short stories than novels. While Swain himself is quick to point out he is simply describing tools which may be used or discarded at will, some of his most fervent advocates take his advice nearly to the point of religious gospel. Despite this, it’s a terrifically meaty book, filled with some of the best advice I’ve ever seen on pacing and creating tension. One could …

You’re Not Good Enough

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‘What if I’m not good enough?’ That’s my goblin. It’s not just my goblin. It’s my husband’s goblin and my friends’ goblins and it haunts the dreams of so many people I know, online and in the real world, who dip their toes in creative works or dive in with both feet and a held breath. That goblin waits for the dark hours of the night and ambushes us from paragraphs of mangled reviews or worse, from the silence of a lone voice echoing lost in the static of the internet. So let me be perfectly clear: you’re not good enough. Don’t be mad. I’m not good enough either. No one is good enough. We are, all of us, flawed and imperfect and self-destructive, and while we are constantly striving towards perfection, it a goal that none of us will ever reach. Take a deep breath and accept that you are not good enough. Be liberated by that, so that you give yourself permission to make mistakes. (Sometimes the accidents are so damn beautiful.) Pick yourself …