I'm working on my last set of revisions, getting ready to change the POV in two chapters from one character to another. You'd think that was easy because events will remain the same, but it's not, because now I have to operate from Myla's interior life instead of Beran's. She has different concerns. How do I show-not-tell them, assuming I can ( Read more... )

I have a number of friends with books coming out or just out, and it's interesting to see how well their covers do at serving as little billboards enticing target readers.

Sarah Prineas's Winterling comes out in January. Harper doesn't seem enthusiastic about my copying the cover art, but here's the link ( Read more... )

There's a vogue for "dark" fiction right now, though it seems to me that what counts as "dark" varies some ( Read more... )

I've been noticing first lines lately. I don't think every book has to have a killer first line but I like it when they do. Here are the first lines of the three novels sitting on my desk:

"Dragons," said Mollander. (From GRRM's Feast for CrowsHaving found that her love for her ex-husband, James Lacey, had more or less disappeared, Agatha ( Read more... )

I was listening to one of Jonathan Coulton's Thing-a-Week CDs this morning and came to a half-joking romantic song where he says ( Read more... )

I had a scene all drafted that I kept coming back to because it just didn't feel right to me and I was having a hard time putting my finger on why, and thus a hard time making it better. At first, I thought it just had insufficient tension, so I upped that, and that was good, but I still wasn't happy ( Read more... )