1,000 Words...
I know; I'm a little behind on my writing, as I have been shooting for 2 books a year (one novel and one novella-length). But the holidays and real life (suck!) got in the way. So I am shooting for 1,000 words a day, which seems reasonable, and by figuring out where I want my word-count to end up, it seems doable. Of course, knowing that I figured Spiretown would be about 25k long (it ended up at 80k+), and A King's Ransom at about 50k (er, final word count was triple that),
Negative reviews and pickled beets: choosing our responses.
I am not the argumentative sort (anymore). An ex of mine found this out when he accused me of “making him mad”. My reply was irritating (I know): “I didn’t ‘make you mad’, you chose to feel mad.” But it brings me to thoughts on responses to harsh or negative reviews. While it would be nice to hand-pick the people we want to read our stories, it’s not like they are wandering around a petting zoo, waiting for us to feed them our words. The vastness of the internet virtually gua
How to Never Become (or stop being) a Productive Writer:
Procrastinate. Really, you want to catch [insert favorite TV series here] the first time around instead of waiting for Netflix. Read every bad review. Whether it’s for your own book or for an author you admire, whatever you thought was brilliant will quickly be quantified as verbal diarrhea and creative turds. Take it to heart. It only proves that you’re not qualified to judge what’s “good” if it comes up and bites you. When writing a story, never get beyond the first scene.