Month: August 2009

  • Writing on Saturday — WABWM

    The official Saturday “Write A Book With Me” post. I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend, and if you’re writing, I hope the words are going well. Download as PDFPrint Page

  • Friday Night WABWM

    Hanging out with my guys. Letting my mind rest—it’s been a long and interesting week, and now I’m refueling for next week. How’s your weekend writing going? Download as PDFPrint Page

  • DTD — 318 words

    It’s been a long, long day. I got words, I figured out a nice twist for my archeologists, and I’m confounding them with the absolute absence of enemies who might want to trash their reputations by planting a badly faked relic. But I’ve got to get some sleep. How about you? Download as PDFPrint Page

  • Why I won’t be teaching grammar in How To Revise Your Novel

    I’ve been reading comments here and on the poll, and I’m seeing a lot of folks angsting about grammar. What people think of as GRAMMAR, (all caps, death knell, end of the world with hellfire and brimstone if you break the rules) is a complete nonissue in writing fiction. In writing fiction, you write as…

  • I’ll be doing How To Revise Your Novel

    I forgot to post this here yesterday, but I’ll be creating the How To Revise Your Novel course. The response was … ah … pretty convincing. 🙂 I’m currently collecting your questions about the revision process, and your comments about the parts of the process as you do it now that give you the most…

  • DTD — 320 words, and some research

    Being too tired does not do great things for the words. I plugged along on my scene tonight, doing a bit of character development, tossing in some plot, and a bit of conflict… and I scrouged for a bit more information on the Minoans. It’s hard to come by. I got what I needed, and…

  • DTD — 466 words, and the Ohio hills of my childhood

    I remember the heat of Ohio summer, and the way the leaves of the oaks and maples in the hills hung heavy on the trees, dusty green and tired. The dirt back roads, the damp, cool sandstone outcrops in the steep hills, the cicadas with their buzzing racket, and me lying in the tall grass…

  • Testing Audio… And The Lady And The Dragon

    I was going through the update of Garageband to try out the set-up for some of the course stuff I want to create. And … um. I got to playing with the voices. And then I got this wild hair to actually sing something. And the song I decided to sing is something I wrote…

  • DTD — 518, and Aleksa meets Maggie

    Sort of a fun scene bit today. Maggie, a college senior working her summer on a mediocre dig in Ohio, shows up to pick up Aleksa from the airport. I enjoyed watching the two of them talk around each other as Aleksa tried to figure out if her old friend Mike had finally found someone,…

  • Do you need to know more about how to revise your novel?

    My daughter took Think Sideways. Wrote her first novel. Is working on revising it now. And she said, “You know, I sort of get the One-Pass Revision, but I wish you had something a lot more in-depth for people who still aren’t sure which parts of what they’ve written are good, and which parts need…