Category: WRITING CLASSES
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Still kicking, still writing
So Ohio Novel #1 is pushing hard toward completion — or rather, I’m pushing hard and it’s fighting me all the way to the finish line. As I’ve discussed on the Alone In a Room with Invisible People podcast, having this book done doesn’t mean there’s going to be a new book. Not soon, anyway.…
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DMP Revision Monday, and Not Too Early for the Halloween Listener Episode
I did four hours of work on Dead Man’s Party yesterday. I got one page of manuscript done. HOWEVER, I finally got the chance to do the thing I used to do first — world building. I got six closely written pages of worldbuilding done, in which I figured out (this is AFTER having written the…
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The Ohio Novel: Art of the Trade
So… Tori’s grandmother was a big fan of The Art of War. Was something of a legend among the folks who trade between the stars. Today was a fun day, as story bits came out of the woodwork at me, including a conspiracy of potentially biggish proportions. After a couple of writing days where the…
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Not so Marketing Tuesday: Finished the BIG HTWAN bonus
Did no marketing today. I had too much of a backlog, and in the middle of The Ongoing Chaos, I have to do what I can when I can… So today I built the last pieces of the How to Write a Novel Graduate BIG bonus. This is Interweaving Multiple Story Threads in Big, Complex Novels. I’m…
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Marketing Tuesday: Not so much, because the HTWAN BONUS is still not done…
Marketing Tuesday got pre-empted by my need to finish the HTWAN Student-Voted Bonus, Interweaving Multiple Story Threads in Big, Complex Novels. Which still isn’t done. Today’s image is a screenshot of one of the pages showing the technique for building and then using the threads in a complex novel. At the speed this is going,…
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How to Write a Novel, Ko-Fi Redraw Tomorrow, and in the Ohio Series Novel today … more questions, no answers
Cold-Engine Fiction I’ll begin with the fiction writing, which this morning started like a frozen engine with a dead battery. I ended up tinkering with a few worldbuilding questions, looking around in the MC’s newly discovered home library, and reading back through a couple of past chapters to figure out why the fact that Tori’s wandering…
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Post-Vertigo: The Ohio Series, Novel One, and shifts in the story
Had a rough last couple of days due to BPPV, but thanks to the Half-Somersault Maneuver, today I’m okay again. And I had a great writing day, with a few caveats. I created a character in the first half of the book that has to go. This character would have (or COULD HAVE) made things…
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Dead Man’s Party: Wrote the SERIES ending…
DEAD MAN’S PARTY Last week I wrote a stand-alone ending for Dead Man’s Party. This week, because I had one week and one chapter left, I wrote a series ending, and showed how I built out pieces of story that do not exist in the first draft, but that, if I decide I want Dead Man’s…
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Dead Man’s Party: 1178 words today, some nice tension, and just three chapters left
I got my words this morning in three ten-minute runs — and I love what I got. I ran a smidge over my goal, but that’s okay. This scene was a short, tight run through the third of four scenes that are occurring simultaneously in the novel as my characters go tearing toward the ending.…
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Insider stuff from my How to Write a Novel students
Monday I asked my existing students the following question: What is the best thing about my How to Write a Novel class? I explained that I would be using their words along with their names or forum IDs to tell people not yet in class what mattered most about it to them. I asked only…