Must read?
Every so often, someone puts out a “top ten must-read” list of books for people unfamiliar with fantasy. There’s nothing much wrong with a list of this nature, if you’re looking for good reading and...
View ArticleWriting and Learning styles
Last Sunday, I was having so much fun going through Mom’s old writing books that I promised a couple more posts on the subject…forgetting that I was going to be out of town until the end of Wiscon. So...
View Article4th Street 2012
I spent last weekend at 4th Street Fantasy convention, which was one of the best I’ve been to in a long time. The only trouble with 4th Street is that almost every single minute, you were faced with,...
View ArticleReading like a writer
Back in the day, one of the pieces of advice I got that drove me crazy was “you have to learn to read like a writer.” I didn’t know what that meant, and no one ever really explained it to me. Evidently...
View ArticleAlexandria and the Terrible Horrible Parody Piece
I’m going to be taking Wednesday off, as I have things to do on Christmas other than compose a blog post; therefore here is a slightly-early Christmas present for everybody. Alexandria and the...
View ArticleWhat you like
When all your friends are bookaholics, one of the things that inevitably happens is that they recommend books to you and to their other friends, frequently in glowing terms. Quite often, other members...
View ArticleThinking about greatness in books
What makes a book great? Having read a lot of articles on the subject, I can say three things with considerably certainty: While there is some agreement about what books are great, there is very little...
View ArticleFiguring Out How (Macrowriting vs. Microwriting)
Every writer I know is a voracious reader, and has been for a long, long time. Most of us are omnivorous as well as voracious – we not only read a lot, we read widely, from literary classics to pulp...
View ArticleDodging reader inertia
Reading involves a certain amount of mental inertia, simply because we are all humans and that’s part of how the basic brain setup works. By “mental inertia” I mean the underlying assumption that how...
View ArticlePerception and plotting
One of the writer complaints I hear regularly about plotting is some variation on “I can’t come up with a plot that’s compelling for the reader. I can’t make the reader care about what happens to the...
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