Reader Questions: process & projects

Joliene asks: [What] drives your writing and keeps the juices flowing? What are the project ideas you have in the works, now that The Walker Papers is being put to bed??? Occasionally what my publisher is looking for drives my writing ideas–that’s what prompted the Strongbox Chronicles, for example, and it’s behind one of the projects I’m putting together now. Far more often, though, it’s a random comment or thought that ends up getting terribly out of control. :) I’ve mentioned before that the Walker Papers were born out of…

Continue Reading

Mountain Echoes by CE Murphy

jumping around

In the last several books I’ve written, I’ve noticed a tendency that as I approach the end, I leap ahead, write the end, then come back and fill bits in. I have been doing that for this whole bloody book. Now, I know people who work this way as a matter of course, but I don’t, and I don’t like it, and seriously, what’s that all about anyway? This evening I realized that it’s because I’m writing the end. I mean, yes, the end happens to be 100,000 words long,…

Continue Reading

process is always a revelation

So I got up to work this morning but still wasn’t feeling the love. There are scenes in this book that I suspect are snowstorms, which– –years and years ago, my writing partner Sarah/ and I wrote a book together. I wrote a wonderful snowstorm scene. It was a chapter long. Sarah cut it to two pages. Then it got cut to a page. In the end, it was two sentences. My beautiful snowstorm! So: in writing terms, a snowstorm is a scene (often a travel scene, as the snowstorm…

Continue Reading

process stuff

So Monday I got started on MOUNTAIN ECHOES, book 8 of the Walker Papers. “Got started” means I re-read the first 3 chapters and the synopsis, and while the chapters were fine, I thought, “Wow, this synopsis *really* sucks. *Really* sucks. There are major problems with it.” And then I started to write. And something happened far earlier in the writing than it happened in the synopsis, and I thought, “That’s probably not a bad thing, because the synopsis is so awful,” and by that time I was starting to…

Continue Reading

cannot brain i have teh dumb

I think I have about a chapter and a half to go on this book. It is getting ever-slower. I have reached the Novelist’s Event Horizon. I’m coming to the conclusion that the last five chapters or so of any book is my least favorite part of writing it. For years now I’ve been skipping ahead and writing the last scene, and I now suspect that this is because I just want to get it over with and have some vague (if desperately wrong) hope that if I write the…

Continue Reading