inspiration has terrible timing

I was very tired last night, and had a HUGE amount to do today, so went to bed at a very sensible hour, ~10:30pm. I then utterly failed to sleep for 90+ minutes. Shortly after midnight, having tossed and turned and gotten up to pee and to make sure my son had done his Pokemon for the day so he wouldn’t lose the 20 day streak he was aiming for for a task, I finally thought I was comfortable and worn out enough to sleep. And the first line of…

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how many words is that, anyway?

Whilst I was being celebratory about 50 published books, one of my friends asked how many words that was, anyway. Anybody wanna take a guess? (You can put it in the comments BEFORE you finish reading this post. I’ll put some spoiler space in, or something. :)) The thing is, I used to have a pretty good idea, actually. I’d kinda kept track up through the end of the publication of the Walker Papers, but that was…a while ago now. So I had to go add it up. And I…

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Process Post: on edit letters

There was a discussion going on over on Bluesky about dealing with edit letters, and this truth came up: “Editors aren’t always right about the solutions, but they’re nearly always right about the problems.” That thread went on to discuss how the person quoting it, who happens to be KJ Charles whose books I read all of last year and who is also an editor, approaches edit letters; her approach involves suggesting ideas to fix the problems, because it opens the writer’s mind to the possiblity that the book could…

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Ask the Author: writing styles

Ask the Author – The Question: What makes an author’s style of writing unique? This will sound sort of trite, but: personal experience. Here’s the thing, and this, again, sounds trite, and indeed, it’s overused, but it’s also true: no one can write the story that *you* can write. Because everyone’s personal experience shapes them differently, and they approach stories differently. I have an exercise I do when I teach creative writing classes. I give everybody the same 5 sentences, the opening of a fairy tale type story written in…

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Ask the Author: writing for Zoe Chant

Ask the Author – the Question: I am curious about how you got in on the Zoe Chant action. And how exactly does it work when multiple authors write under a single pen name? Hah! I got in on it because I have a friend who writes for Zoe and she spent years trying to get me to apply to write for them. Eventually I did. And while that sounds easy enough on the surface, it took me two rewrites of one book and then another entire book entirely to…

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