Category: How To Think Sideways
-
Coming of the Fen — The Ohio Invasion
There’s a certain amount of wackiness in what I have going on right now, in spite of the fact that the core of the problem my characters are facing is nothing less than save-the-world with a pretty big dollop of save-a-bunch-of-worlds. I’m having a helluva lot of fun playing with the situation. But… I can’t…
-
Way in the woods and the weeds… and enjoying myself: 1323 words and 57,419 total
I am by preference an outliner, not a pantser. By preference I have a map for the novel I’m writing, and while I make take a small side road on the map rather than the freeway, in general I don’t abandon the damn car and go hiking through the woods and the weeds with nothing…
-
Building into a nice conflict for my main character and the town… and UP NEXT…
Got the words. Like the words. Got 1260 words total for the day (so just over my daily objective), and 54,792 in the book. I also stole a line from one of my poems posted on this site as a quote for my main character’s most important ally, because it was perfect for the place…
-
Sun Tzu and the Art of Cookies…
I stepped into a scene this morning where I was expecting to be goofy and funny, and instead, I found Sun Tzu waiting for me. My relationship with Sun Tzu is a long-standing one. I met him when I was twenty-seven, when my first husband told me that if I divorced him, it was going…
-
SURPRISED!!! Two characters who went missing reappeared today with a helluva story…
I didn’t know what to expect when I sat down to write today, and what happened when the words started rolling in came at me from out of left field. The whole writing time was pretty perfect — it answered a question I thought I’d lost track of, allowed me to bring back two folks…
-
A quirky direction that might be a mistake… 1267 words, and 50,690 total
Today the story took what felt like a logical turn, and I let myself run with it. The understanding here, though, is that I’ve brought an edge of science-fiction and fantasy fandom into the fifth novel, and doing this might be a break in the fourth wall that will break the novel. I’m going to…
-
Behind the third door… 1401 words, and the mystery that revealed the mystery within
Today’s writing was philosophical… and probably a bit expository. Which means what I wrote today is probably going to get heavily edited during the revision. But I learned something big about my novel’s world today — something that has been creeping into the back of my brain in bits and pieces for the last couple…
-
Expository Lump-ness — 1290 new words, and yeah, it’ll have to be revised… but…
I needed to explore the significance of the thing that happened yesterday, because it’s a big damn deal, because I didn’t expect what happened, and because I don’t know what’s waiting for me when I take my character down to the end of the hall to look at what’s changed. So today, I ran with…