I may have been mumbling about how I need to get more motivated to get back to writing more in my different fandoms. I may have said this out loud. I was then persuaded by persistent texting over the past month (the irony of this does not escape me here) from a few known culprits to join the The Game Is On writing challenge LJ community. Now, I've ( Read more... )

Been reading a book [ Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara? by Jenny Bond and Chris Sheedy ] off and on while waiting for lines and things this week ( Read more... )

Heard a great quote from Donald P. Bellisario on the NCIS DVD commentary track on how to create a stronger more interesting story.

--It's not about going from A to B to C in the plot. It's about what the characters are doing and saying as they go from A to B to C. That's what makes an interesting story.

All right, I'm done editing a huge couple of 400 page projects (see the anthology zine "Brotherhood 7" and the Supernatural zine "Brotherhood 8", see [ Pyramids Press ], see trade paperbacks that ate my life for the past several months, see I'm way too addicted to caffeine now) and I was actually crunching down and writing again ( Read more... )

I was thinking about how I've heard "Show, Don't Tell" as a mantra for writers over and over again, and yet it comes through as white noise somehow for me. What does SHOW mean? I know I'm supposed to do it. But how ( Read more... )

When a character has issues, show them making bad decisions. Hint at how they're messed up by having them make bad personal choices deliberately ( Read more... )

Dark stories are not always sad stories. Why do I like some and not others? What makes a dark emo angst fest satisfying to me?

( Writing Thinky Thoughts )

What I did on my weekend vacation...learn Word document code from [ Brate ] . It's weird but it makes me happy, and it's useful for saving fic in a Word document to make it look nice, or to post fic up so that it's spaced right automatically by the "replace" command. In other words, how to cut and paste stuff from online to offline, and back again ( Read more... )

As I've mentioned, I like to read stuff about writing. And by stuff, I mean essays, chapters, news articles, fortune cookie suggestions, podcasts (true, technically not reading, but still...). In any event, this week's key point that I latched onto ( Read more... )

I was talking with a friend about how writing stories can be frustrating because you have this image in your head and yet all that is coming out on the paper is stick figures. But then we discussed how if you feel like you're writing awkwardly or stiltedly you shouldn't let that stop you from getting it down on paper. Get the story done ( Read more... )