Aaron cranked the handles of the arbalest with arms turned leaden by hours standing the garrison wall, the draw racheting back just that much slower every time. But at last the next bolt was in place and he raised his weapon again, loosed it down amongst the besiegers. Beside the line of men, lady Alana paced, pale eyes flashing fury and goad, pale hair haloed in the evening sunlight and crowned with the white and purple anemones that were the…
Once again, I’ve just posted the last installment of my most recent SSCS, and now it’s time to chat a bit about the story. If you’ve been unsure about this one and waiting to read it (you can start with the first installment here), maybe this post will pique your curiosity enough to give it a try. Or, if you read along and have thoughts about what you just read, maybe this will stir them around a little. Either way,…
This is a post about writing. Specifically, it is a post about how characters interact with the events of a story and how the two things inform each other. First, though, note the standard disclaimers about ‘writing advice’: Everybody writes differently. Everyone has different things that allow them to connect with the story that they are trying to tell and to then get it to manifest in words, and also different stories often require different approaches. Any ‘advice’ you might…
I will have you know it’s difficult to write a story when the voices of Ross and Rachel from Friends insist on being the mental-voice narrators. Though, they’re maybe a little better than Scrooge McDuck, who was more often the hazard when my kids were little. But still, very disruptive!
Once again, I’d like to explore a little more of the idea that encountering an example of bad writing by someone else can actually provide an excellent opportunity to improve your own writing. (My previous discussion about this is here.) As a writer, it’s always important to read plenty, both for enjoyment (of course!) and to have a lot of examples to draw from of what sort of writing is to your taste. But when you come across something that…
I promise this is a post about writing, but first I have to start here: In the martial arts in general, and more particularly in the martial art that I practice, TaeKwonDo (TKD), there are a lot of principles students are required to learn about and encouraged to follow. Some of these are like the student oath (e.g., ‘I shall never misuse TaeKwonDo’) or the tenets (e.g., Integrity). Others are frameworks for learning and conceptualizing the core values and lessons…
Got another reminder today that the story needs to start with the most important info first. I got turned around on the one I’m working on because the setting is contemporary. But the story itself is still speculative fiction, so the spec.fic. element does still need to exist right up front. Thank goodness. I was really struggling there.
Well, once again it is the time of year when I’d like to post up how my writing progress has gone for the year. For past years, the posts are at: 2024, 2023. This year I’ve been kind of dreading putting this post together, because 2025 has not been a good writing year for me. Instead 2025 has been a lot in terms of life events, especially in the first half of the year, and that has translated on the…
I’ve just posted the final installment of my latest serialized story to this blog. And so now, for either those who’ve held off reading it yet and maybe need some enticement, or for those who just like to hear about what went into a story, I’d like to tell you a bit more about it. We’re going to do this in a quasi-interrogation format, just for fun, and also to keep things from wandering too far afield. Author Interrogations: SSCS-03…
How do you start a story? How do you end a story? These can be extremely vexing questions for any writer. But one thing anyone can remember when you hit this wall is that you were actually taught the best way to begin and end nearly any piece of writing in Middle School. Remember? Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them. That, of course, sounds super-pedantic and boring, which is…