18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Well, there's the great sprawling unfinished mess affectionately known as the "porn saga", which has both a desert-island alternate and a "character gets a spine infusion and gets himself a life ( Read more... )

A comment elsewhere by Deep Lurker nailed something so fundamental that I don't think I'd ever fully realized it before, when brainstorming story ideas and rejecting what seem like perfectly reasonable suggestions:
When I have a Cool Idea as a story-starter, I really don’t want it to become the Story Problem. It might be the Cool Solution to the ( Read more... )

I am having a problem. I have this story idea. It's a good idea, I like it, but I absolutely cannot get it moving. And the reason I can't get it moving seems to be that the characters are effectively non-existent, just plot roles without personalities. This never happens to me. Characters wander into my head and set up housekeeping at the slightest ( Read more... )

I had two stated goals for this NaNoWriMo when I started: (1) Teach myself to do this level of output while still working the day job, carrying on with house projects in progress, etc. -- in short, without putting the entire rest of life on hold. (2) Remind myself that writing can be fun ( Read more... )

( Cut for yet more spoilers on unpublished novel )

As I threatened mentioned a while ago, I went back and checked if I'd written anything useful about my process while finishing the Haley novel, because I'm feeling a similar sort of stuck on FFG ( Read more... )

( More spoilerish rambling about unpublished novel )

This is an example of why plot as it's usually discussed doesn't make sense to me.

( Spoilers for as-yet-unfinished and unpublished novel... )

Similar to something I posted about previously, but it's a concept worth revisiting. Yeah, I don't get how writers could get their characters mixed up, either. I mean, I'm not likely to mistake Kerr Avon for Jack O'Neill, now am I? And I know a great deal more about my own characters.

This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel. ( Read more... )

I have come up with a "what the hell's going on" for the Mars novel that is just evil, evil, eeeevil. I probably won't use it -- it's not quite the kind of story I thought I was writing, and it's got its own "what's going on" that would need to be solved -- but it is so far the only idea I've come up with that connects all the dots ( Read more... )