Category: Articles on Writing
-
Last day of the year… and about ready to get back to work
It hasn’t been the best year in my life. It hasn’t been the worst, either. I wrecked four first drafts of my Ohio Series (books two through five) by exuberatant pantsing. After a longish Think Week and some time spent away from fiction writing and away from deadlines, I’m rested and ready to go through…
-
In spite of a bit of uphill-ery, I got there. 1281 words, 62,753 total
And I managed along the way to muddy my feet on Vikings, evolutionary biology, predator psychology, and something that looks like next Monday it could traipse into the realm of the steamy near-miss. I also had a lot of wicked fun, got in a couple of funny one-liners, and at the end of the day…
-
Writer-Related Stuff… The Thursday List, and why it’s on hold.
I was building a really nice writing-tips email list for my writers. Every Thursday, (or mostly every Thursday), I was creating one new writing tip, answering a writer’s question, demonstrating a quick version of some technique I’ve found helpful… And then the HollysWritingClasses.com class software died. Hard. And we spent six months installing new software,…
-
Oh, such wicked fun today! 1257 words, and 44,099 total.
I have only the vaguest idea of where the story is going right now. I’m a long way off of the planned outline, writing into the dark, following the conflict, and asking always, “What could go wrong?” “What could go wrong?” is the right question for this section, for this book, for the aftermath of…
-
Desktop Curtain, from Many Tricks: My single favorite Mac app
Big fan that I am of GSD (getting shit done), I’ve found things over the years that have made GSD easier. The screenshots below are Before and After on a TINY section of my very large desktop this morning. The white bar on the left isn’t neatness. It’s Scrivener below a 30-word PACTS Sentence that…
-
Words went well, bad things happened…
And once again, I loved what I got. My poor, poor characters… And I got 1351 words, and am now at 68,056 — and the villains in town have just done something really interesting, and my MC just got to see the first tip of a brand new iceberg… But I now have to go…
-
Today — the tedium of drudge work
I had to move all the line-for-scene Sentences for books four and five into their Scrivener sections — the pre-built thirty-chapter manuscripts I set up for all five books when I started this project. So now the books are outlined, the manuscripts are ready to go… And Monday I’ll get back to the words. It…
-
Today I studied the map, asked WHY… made good progress on OUTLINE 5… figured out why YESTERDAY crashed…
Can’t say today was easy. I walked in circles (literally) because pacing helps me generate ideas, talked to myself out loud to ask important questions, looked at my map and drew a few circles on it to identify story issues… And then I went back to the line-for-scene outline and managed to come up with…
-
Down into the DEEP dark… Outline 4 completely redone.
After the weekend break, I came in this morning to a blank outline for Ohio 4, and no idea what was going to go in there… except that it had to be big. I suspect, however, that while I was playing a lot of No Man’s Sky and having fun in my new solar system with…
-
Business Only day: No words, no progress…
Today turned, though no fault of its own, into a necessary business day. Writing fiction is a business… but so is life. And from time to time, the ‘life’ stuff has to come first. And I’d let a lot of that pile up, and when you do that, you then have to deal with the…