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.

Penfold left me a voice message saying that she was tired of thinking about work for the day and wanted to know what I was reading. I started to make a list of what books I'd gone through lately to voicemail her back and started laughing at how long my list was getting and at how odd the mix was. So I decided to answer the question here because…

( Some People Stress Eat, Apparently I Stress Read. )

Random ramblings of de-cluttering randomness ( Read more... )

The idea for a fic rec panel came about two years ago when [ Wraithfodder ] did an awesome one for Stargate Atlantis. It was like a Fanfic Nato Summit with laptops and everything as people called out and culled from their favorite lists and others pulled up the url's as they went.

Well, a few of us did a 2.0 version last year, creating a [ ( Read more... )

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... )

While I was in the airport last month I stood in one of the little bookstores clutching my coffee in one hand and reading a book with the other while I waited for my flight to be called. One of the books I went through was [ "Kitchen Sink Reflections" by Marla Cilley ]. The book had some nice information and I ended up taking out my journal and ( Read more... )

Wow, when it rains it pours. At this rate I hope the deluge continues ( Read more... )

If you live in the Southern California area, there is an exclusive screening of Jared Padalecki's "Christmas Cottage" (the Thomas Kinkade story) that is happening this Thursday (November 13th) at the Irvine Spectrum Edwards Cinema in Irvine, California (just south of Los Angeles in Orange County ( 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... )