Following up somewhat on last week’s process post… Recently on Twitter Tobias Buckell mentioned he was 6K into a 10K synopsis for a 55K book. Kate Elliott chimed in to say that in December, she’d managed 4K a day for 2 weeks straight–far above her usual writing average–due to having a supremely clear idea of what had to happen in the book at that point. I myself have become increasingly aware that the more I outline, the more smoothly the book goes. Particular cases in point were THE PRETENDER’S CROWN,…
Category: Writing
worth the price of admission
I had the sudden suspicion that Scrivener might let me put both my synopsis and the chapter I was working on up in a split screen, and lo, within a few seconds I’d figured out how to do so. That feature alone is worth the price of admission. I’ve also got an obviously-increasingly-useful sidebar going on with research materials filling up, and find a sort of unholy glee in the idea that it’s all just right there to flip through instead of digging through browser bookmarks or random text files.…
Scrivener
When I first encountered Scrivener I thought, “Wow, this is a really great way to spend a huge amount of time doing work that isn’t writing.” I still think it’s that, but I’m coming around to seeing how it’s also got the potential to be an incredibly useful tool. I’m working on a couple of projects where I need to be able to keep track of a lot of names and relationships, and my general method (methos) of doing that is by keeping document files with random information inserted into…
Magic & Manners: Chapter Five
My gift to you this Valentine’s Day is chapter five of MAGIC & MANNERS! (Start here if you haven’t been reading along!) And, okay, folks, I’m doin’ it! I’m crowdfunding this baby! If you’ve enjoyed MAGIC & MANNERS thus far, visit my Patreon page to support its continuation! Patreon’s not like Kickstarter: it’s for small projects rather than big ones, and relies on small, regular donations instead of one larger one. So you might decide to donate $1 per chapter, and if 250 people decide to donate $1/chapter, then every…
Character Development
A while back, I put forth a general call for questions about writing that people might want to ask me, and, er, I just remembered that I had the list stored, so I thought I’d answer one! :) Heather asks: Character inspirations – from whom did you draw the personality traits of Joanne, Gary, Morrison, Margrit, Alban, Janx, Daisani, etc. This one’s particularly entertaining because Heather’s a high school friend of mine who has never been able to see herself or anybody she knows in any of my characters, so…