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An aspiring writer friend of mine composes all of his fiction in the first person. The character is always an "I", not a "he" or a "she" (or an "it", or even a "they", but I digress). I've been more mutable than that: The Four-Day Weekend was first person, but Summerworld and Tokyo Inferno were third. Why the differences?

I asked myself that ( Read more... )

Pet peeve time.

Sometimes I run into a writer expressing a sentiment which I will paraphrase as follows: I know that the way I write isn't for everyone, and I don't expect everyone to like it. I have my own voice to follow and my own path to walk.

Most every time I hear some variety of this exact sentiment - and I have heard it many times from many ( Read more... )

Among the books I picked up during a one-dollar spree at The Strand a while back is a nifty little volume entitled Off-Hollywood: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films. The emphasis is as much on the marketing as it is the making - that is, the process of finding money for the project, the logistics of creating it, the often knotty problems ( Read more... )

Fellow writer Catherynne M. Valente mulls over writing SF after spending a long time being a fantasy writer:

Rules for Anchorites - On Writing SF
I also feel, mostly because for me SF is the Mysterious Other, that it's much harder to do something new over in that camp. It's like vampires or elves. So much has been done and redone well or badly. ( Read more... )

I suspect few people reading this don't know about TVTropes, one of the few sites that gives Wikipedia itself a run for the money in the Where Did The Time Go Dept. It's also easy to read it, to ignore the very advice the site's creators give about it (tropes are not bad, they're just ingredients to be used for well or ill), and to go on a mad ( Read more... )

Back at AnimeNext, I mentioned offhandedly to fellow budding writer David S. McCrae "Any writer who wants to call himself one should have a fountain pen." (Paraphrasing from memory, but that was the gist of it.) I wasn't kidding then, and now I think I'm twice as not kidding.

When you write longhand, as opposed to typing, you force yourself to think ( Read more... )

My good friend B McD has his own follow-up installment in the "genesis of the bad LotR clones" discussion. I'm just coming off a whole flood of finished work (as if you couldn't tell from the spamblogalicious posts I just made), but I want to sit down with this and comment on it when time and energy permit. It's a good read; don't hold off from ( Read more... )

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From here
I was intrigued by your comment over at Jim Hines's journal that you had decided to go the self-publishing route, writing for the audience you had developed, even though you knew the limitations that that route imposes. How did you arrive at that decision?

Kind of a long story-but hey, it's the Internet, it's not like I'm going to run out ( Read more... )