By Jan S. Gephardt After I finished What’s Bred in the Bone and published it in 2019, I thought writing A Bone to Pick would be lots easier than writing the first book in the Trilogy. After all, I had an outline. I had scenes, cut from the first novel, all ready to go into the second one. It was partly written already! I should easily have it ready to go by 2020. A year, maybe 18 months, tops, because…
I hope Mr. Escher was right, because right now I’ve got a big, chaotic pileup of things that I’ve had on “hold” for weeks on end, and now it’s time to deal with them. So far, producing order hasn’t been all that lovely a task. Why the pileup? Because something had to give. For these last many weeks, my primary focus had to be consistently, obsessively, compulsively, on One Important Thing. I spent the weeks between Fourth of July and Labor Day this year embarked on a massive…
The Artdog Image of Interest If you’re tired of Na-No-Wri-Mo posts, I’m sorry–gonna inflict at least one more on you. Because once you get to a certain point in your writing, it’s time to–GASP!–show it to someone else!! It’s pretty scary, because even after all that work, it’s inevitable that it’s not perfect. Gotta be done. Find someone you trust and hand it over. It’s What Has to Happen Next, on the writer’s journey. Good luck! IMAGE: Once again, I’m grateful to the wonderful Debbie Ridpath Ohi and her web comic…
November–and Na-No-Wri-Mo (National Novel Writing Month) is almost over. A lot of people will be trying their best to close in on 50,000 words by midnight tomorrow. To cheer them on, today’s post is a collection of wisdom about FINISHING. A 50,000-word manuscript that has a beginning, middle, and end technically qualifies as a novel, in some genres. For my particular genre, science fiction, the contemporary normal finished length is 90,000-120,000 words, so 50,000 words will get you maybe about halfway there. But no matter how you slice it, 50,000 words…
Why would anyone try to write a novel? It’s an appropriate question for Na-No-Wri-Mo (National Novel Writing Month). Personally, I’m in great sympathy with Toni’s reason: In my experience, writing the first draft of any project, especially a novel, is an exercise in faith. Faith that you’ll work out the problems, that you have something interesting to say, that you’ll find good, better, and even-better-than-that ways to say it. Everything is possible at the beginning—especially in my chosen field of science fiction. But then you start to create your world….