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Tag Archives: writing
Jun
5
Breaking the 4th Wall
It occurs to me that I tend to break the 4th wall quite a bit in the Abby books. Not that it’s a bad thing, per se – but particularly in this third book, there seems to be more open winks and nods to a certain group of readers in various places. (Mostly gamer sorts, of course). And not that it has anything to do with the story directly – some of it is subtle and some is pretty blatant, but none of it is required to understand the story as it stands. I could remove it completely and not really change anything. It’s probably a no-no, much like the using of contemporary song titles or technology or brand names. It’s something a lot of writers face – particularly if they mention modern current events (9/11, for example). It can be tricky to pull off and sometimes you run the…
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Jun
1
The First Ten Thousand
The fog thickens around me like a cloak made of soot and ancient rust. The coverage is deceptive, making it seem as though the lower bowels of the city are cleaner than its wont. But like a diseased whore, all it takes is a stiff breeze from the fetid bay to remove the illusion, the skirts lifted to reveal the rotting core beneath. I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this before, but in either case, there’s something rather interesting about those first ten thousand words in a novel. It’s just enough to see the beginnings of what the story is going to be about…but not so far along that things are locked into place. Case in point, yes I’ve only got 10k written on this new book – but I’ve also backed off and restarted it several times, undoing several k worth of words each time. Not sure why, but…
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May
21
Permission to Plan
I find myself at a bit of a mental cross-roads these days when it comes to my writing. Part of this is because I still consider myself a panster – when I’m writing, I’ve got my daily word count and I attempt to meet it or do better and life is good. But with this latest book, I’m having to do more research and more planning, and even though its so important to the story as a whole, I still feel guilty if I’m not actually putting words on the page. (Never mind that it does me no good to write something that I’ll have to rework heavily later on because it will be out of sync with the plotting later.) Not sure what my issue is, quite frankly. Plotting is new for me and it’s hard to give myself the time to *do* it. I suspect I’m afraid I’ll…
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May
16
The Value of Words
With A Trace of Moonlight coming out this fall, I’m starting to turn my eye toward my next bout of promo and swag and all the other things that may or might not improve sales. (And incidentally, there is a cover up over at Amazon and various other places, but it is a LEAKED cover – not the finished one and not of good size or quality. Rest assured I’ll post a final copy here once I’m allowed.) At any rate, one of the things I’ve noticed is that my Kindle books are getting tagged as being overpriced. Which is nothing new. My ebooks run the same price as the MMPB – and that’s the price set by the publisher. I have zero control over it. And I’m not objecting to people being unhappy with the prices – after all with so many books running around at the .99 price…
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May
1
The Aftermath
Of course, the problem with handing in revisions is that once I’ve pulled the trigger to send them off, my brain refuses to shut down. Five minutes after I moved away from the computer, my author-mind was like “Hey, you really should have fleshed out that scene there. Just a couple of lines. That’s all you need. Really.” And maybe I do. The good thing is that I still have time for small changes; it will be a little bit before the copyeditor gets the ms back to me. It’s probably good for me to take a small break from it anyway – after looking at it so hard core for the last few weeks, I’ve lost perspective on it. I’ve reached that saturation point where every sentence looks like crap. I’m second-guessing all my plot points – too much? not enough? OMFG the almost-sort-of-love-triangle? Will the readers be disappointed…
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