There is a character in Brimstone Angels, who tested my patience, readers: he steadfastly refused all of my attempts at naming him. In my initial notes, this character was called Mallok. He was the clear and obvious human villain of what would become Brimstone Angels. Mallok sounds like a good, cackly evil name, wouldn’t you […]
(Writing advice is something I’m afraid this blog is always going to have a fair amount of. When I don’t know what to write about, I tend to want to write about writing. On the one hand, I’m almost embarrassed by the fact that my default mode is to tell other people their business. One […]
Start with a working title: The Tiefling Book. This is just to put on the editor’s schedule and to discuss in meetings. Once you are definitely writing the book, it will have a second name for contract purposes which will either be your last name or the name of the series (in this case “Planetouched […]
I’m having lunch with my sister today and she asks how things are going. “Terrible,” I say. “I hate my book.” “Aw!” she says. She’s read a few excerpts over my shoulder. “Why?” I launch into an explanation of my main character’s radically shifting voice (to my perspective). She doesn’t agree. In fact, she’s giving […]
There’s an analogy for editing I like (mostly because I made it up): Editing is a lot like swimming in a pool full of diamonds. It seems glamorous and enviable from the outside. People might wonder what the heck you did to deserve the right to swim in diamonds all day, and want to hear […]
Dear Erin, You have and probably will continue to forget these things. Forgetting them causes you undue anxiety. You are hitting your word count, but you are talking yourself into a freaking fir. Please refer back to this list as necessary. Kisses, Yourself 1. Your outline is not a holy writ. At the same time your editor […]
This blog, it’s turning out, triggers my anxiety. A bit. See, I have a decent-sized anxiety disorder. I do think of it in terms of size, as I find what matters is how much and where it overlaps the rest of my life. I take my meds, I do my therapy, I work on asking […]
*In an attempt to make this blog even more interesting, here begins a review of the places I take my laptop to.* If there’s one thing I don’t like about living where I live, it’s that there aren’t enough cafes in walking distance. If I learned to like walking farther, though, and if it would […]
I wrote a book called The God Catcher. See? Writing is, in general, something I love to do, and I was thrilled to get the chance to write something that I’d be paid for and that other people would read. Signing the work for hire contract felt like a momentous shift in my life. But there […]