I’m totally cheating, but Forged Steel releases next week (eeeeep!), so…yeah. This whole blog is going to be chock full of cheats, since these happen to be the two hardest letters of the alphabet to work with. So, here goes. Y is for Why I write. (See, told you I was cheating.) I’m sure I’ve […]

Xeroxed characters. Have you ever read a book and thought that every single one of the characters sounded and acted the same way and even seemed to have the same motivations? It’s almost like the author just copied one character several different times, gave them a different hair or eye color to distinguish, and set […]

Worldbuilding. You guys are lucky today…you don’t have to listen to me ramble on! 🙂 Instead, I invited my friend L. N. Weldon, a master worldbuilder, to talk about it a bit. It’s a long post, but totally worth it. ~~~~~~~~~~ Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding. For a lot of us writers, the whole concept […]

The Vacant Stare. You know the one I’m talking about. That glazed-over, gazing-calmly-into-the-middle-distance look that writers get when they’re stuck or distracted. Depending on how close the deadline is, or how long the writer has been stuck, the Vacant Stare may or may not have an edge of unhinged panic to it. This can fall […]

Unobservant. I got called ‘unobservant’ as a kid a lot, usually because my nose was stuck in a book. My mom said, on more than one occasion, that the house could probably burn down around my ears without me noticing. In all fairness, it often took someone yelling in my ear–more than once–to get my […]

As an author, I’ve never forgotten how to daydream ~ Neil Gaiman Thinking–or, as some would call it, daydreaming. Do you ever just sit and stare out the window on a rainy day, or watch the side of the road as you ride in a car? For a while, I’d gotten out of the habit, […]