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Inspiration vs. Perspiration

Life happens:  appointments must be kept, houses cleaned, food bought and then cooked, clothes washed, grandbabies babysat, volunteer duties fulfilled, and in the process, time for writing goes by the wayside.  After a week or so of this, my muse is dusty and aching from lack of use, and will simply not be tamed into helping me fashion a sentence of any sort.  And so I sit, waiting for inspiration to strike.
Appeared 2007-07-23 in The Sword Review

New Year -- New Beginnings

This New Year is bringing an important event into my life, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to diverge from my usual "writing advice" (such as it is) and ramble a bit.
Appeared 2007-03-08 in The Sword Review

Reaching for Perfection

I tend to sometimes drive myself crazy when I'm doing story revisions, crippling myself with indecision on plot points or characterization to the point that I put the story away in frustration. Sometimes that's a good thing -- maybe the story needs to rest. But most often, it's just me being me. And today I realized what I was doing wrong.
Appeared 2007-01-28 in The Sword Review

Say What You Mean

In SpecFic, it's important to say what you mean. In magical and futuristic worlds that have no basis in fact, anything and everything can happen. People can fly, animals can talk, mind-speaking is the best form of communication, shape-changing happens on a daily basis, and ghosts are real. Until you set the "rules" for your world before your reader, be very careful of your descriptive sentences.
Appeared 2006-12-02 in The Sword Review

Purple Prose

Come on.  You know you've been guilty of it. All beginning writers are, at some point in their career, trying to stand out from the crowd by using flowery words and sugar-coated descriptions. You know what I'm talking about: Purple Prose.

Appeared 2006-10-25 in The Sword Review

Does Rejection Equal Failure?

A rejection letter is not a failure.  It's just a "no thanks."  Repeat that ten times before and after each writing session.  

Appeared 2006-09-26 in The Sword Review

World Rules

One of the joys of speculative fiction writing is being able to create worlds entirely from your imagination.  It's like reliving your childhood where you played "pretend" and "what if."  But whereas in childhood there were no rules and anything could happen, in the writing game, your pretend world has to have rules and boundaries.  Without rules, your story world is chaotic and inconsistent, and readers don't like that.  

Appeared 2006-08-30 in The Sword Review

Don't Waste Writing Time!

Should we wait for our own mortality to come shove itself in our faces before we follow our dreams?  

Appeared 2006-07-29 in The Sword Review

Fate -- In all its forms

In fantasy, all things are possible.  Fate lives and pokes its finger into the characters' lives, and often is almost a character in itself.  
Appeared 2006-07-06 in The Sword Review

Setting - Don't leave home without it!

How is setting different from place or world building?   Setting is the very specific section of the place or world in which a scene happens.  In describing the setting, the writer's goal is to ground the reader into the place where the action is happening.  
Appeared 2006-06-23 in The Sword Review

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