Character and world-building: two essential skills for writers. I’d submit that our invented characters and worlds are inevitably reflections of our real worlds and our understanding of ourselves and others. Some of that understanding comes hard-won and first-hand. I learn through falling down. I also learn through shifting perspectives. I need a sense of the wider context in which my own life sits, and I need it to believably write people who aren’t me. I also have trouble reading fiction when I’m working a lot on my own writing. Something about the process, especially in the last couple of years, has made it very hard for me to get swept up in a novel the way I used to. I get hung up on the craft of it, like having x-ray vision, seeing the skeleton too prominently beneath the skin. Non-fiction also has its tropes and conventions, but since it isn’t what I am writing, it’s easier for me to read it wholeheartedly. And I’ve read a lot more of it in the past couple of years. So: this is going to be the first of a series of posts about amazing non-fiction that has expanded my understanding of people […]
Setting Myself Up for the Win
2016 is going to be a huge year for me, with the release of Spells of Blood and Kin in June. And 2014 was a huge year, too: the year I signed with my wonderful agent Connor, the year he made the sale. A year of leveling up. 2015, then, was a bridge year in some ways: a year to consolidate my gains, to do all the work I could to make sure this next phase in my writing life will be a successful one. Timelines in writing are very long compared to some kinds of work: even more than a year, in my case, between deal and launch. I came to learn that it’s very useful time! Edits, proofing, and a lot of other associated tasks took a lot of it. And of course, other projects need to be in the pipeline–my next book, plus some short stories, although the time I’ve spent on those has dropped a lot since the novel has to take priority. Like most working writers, I also have a day job–which is understating it a bit; I have a career which I love, and which is sometimes demanding. Between this, family events, and cons, […]