novel writing | novel writing
Feb.22.2009
Greetings and thank you for coming by. What follows is the first of a series of essays on the writing of my nearly finished novel, Dragon's Ark, that I posted starting a couple of years ago over on Blogspot. For those of you Red Room writers who haven't gone over to my old site, I thought I would...
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Feb.06.2009
While I’m a fiction writer now, I discovered in grad school the joys of writing plays. One of them was that actors would be reading the lines, and if something didn’t work, he, she, or the director would tell me. Also, I could sit in the dark and watch people respond to something I’d written, but...
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Jan.31.2009
I was chatting on Facebook to the Badly Behaved Boy yesterday. He has an overdue 2000 word essay to write and yet his poor Muse is cowering in a dusty corner with a wet towel about her head, moaning about the effects of a bucketload of cheap vodka, too many late nights and ill-preparation on the...
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Jan.29.2009
This could be a cautionary tale. Or a source of inspiration. Your choice.
The long version
I didn’t know what I was doing; I kept changing my mind about whether to write in the first, second or third person; I was writing about far away places and had to do a lot of research; for a long time I had...
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Jan.29.2009
Earlier this week, I finished the first write-through of my new Porfiry Petrovich novel, A RAZOR WRAPPED IN SILK. I’m leaving it for a few days before I do my first read-through. As it currently stands, it’s longer than anything I’ve yet written, about sixty words short of the 125K mark. I suspect...
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Dec.14.2008
I’ve been reading through the novel I wrote last year in November and December. When I finished it, I read the whole thing aloud to Angie, night after night for maybe a week. I haven’t been able to bring myself to reread more than the first few pages of it since until this month when I’ve been up...
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Dec.13.2008
When I first began the story that would become my first novel, it started off in a writing class. My teacher gave us a prompt to create a scene where two characters had secrets they were keeping from on another. We were apparently a sad sack class, one that could not create tension for the life...
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Nov.30.2008
I’m glad that writing the “Obscure, Obfuscate, etc.” blog is finally over because I can now finally press on to more important matters like going back to writing more interesting stuffs. It is not a complete waste, though, because I have learned how to write from a novelist point of view other...
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Nov.12.2008
It’s an interesting phenomenon, this November Novel Writing Month. That writers’ fingers can flutter out something like 50,000 words in one month’s time is impressive. And that those same fingers can pound their keyboards for solitary and silent days on end shows true perseverance and dedication,...
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Nov.06.2008
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
I never intended this to be a political blog. Still less did I intend it to be a blog about marriage, of all things. But sometimes you get seized by a political moment. It's made writing my novel hard, although I am about to land my narrator in...
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