If you're looking for a place to talk shop with other writers you might want to consider
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I have been meaning to do a Mad Max: Fury Road post approximately forever since I've seen it (and you won't convince me there was a whole world, history, and civilization before it came out), but everything kept coming out as FTBRRLT MUST MARRY IT AND HAVE ITS BABIEZZZ. The only halfway coherent thoughts I got down were in a discussion with ( Read more... )

Following on the discussion of the highly rapey Sky Maiden and Woodsman story, I looked through my niece's copy to see it for myself. It was just a standard telling, but there was a page at the end of the book talking about the "lessons" for children. I read it, wondering if it put the problematic elements of the story in perspective ( Read more... )

Friday and the weekend was taken up with a series of work and social engagements (and sleep, sweet sleep) but I did read several articles about ancient Goguryeoh and Baekje and write out some of my ideas about Book 1. The most interesting article was about the strategic use of traffic routes by the ancient Chinese to cut the ancient Korean groups ( Read more... )

I'm reading Story Engineering by Larry Brooks--almost finished it, in fact. The good news is I found it pretty helpful. I'll probably review it later on, and will use the method described in the book to outline my novels in progress ( Read more... )

Originally posted to the
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I am not the first of my line to write about my heroine's times. The celebrated thirteenth-century writer Lee Gyubo (李奎報, 1168~1241) wrote the Lay of the King in the Eastern Light (東明王篇), an epic poem about the first king of Goguryeoh a.k.a. my heroine's second husband. Lee, also known as Master White Cloud (白雲居士) and Lord of Gentle Prose (文順公), is ( Read more... )

After another compulsive bout of reading last night, I finally learned where my heroine's home in the first century B.C. was likely to have been located. Here's what it looks like today:

( Folded for pictures and rambling )

Why turn Backspace off?

Some writing exercises (freewriting is one example) and challenges (such as NaNoWriMo) aim at freeing the mind to produce whatever comes up, and discourage editing at the writing stage. For many of us, however, deleting typos or awkward turns of phrase is a reflex that simple willpower cannot turn off. For this reason the web ( Read more... )