Category: Writing

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Curiosity

Curiosity may have killed a cat or two, but can you imagine life without it? We’d be puffed up with certainty; willfully ignorant blobs happy to consume whatever dreck’s put in front of us, happy to parrot any conspiracy theory or celebrity gossip or whatever the latest outrage is that algorithmic or human manipulators want us to spread. Doesn’t sound too exciting, does it? So, yeah, curiosity is pretty essential for a mindful, deliberate life. It prevents us from stagnating and beating our heads against the walls of our own echo chambers. It keeps us open to new ideas and Read More …

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The Short Story Conundrum

One of the ways to catch an agent’s eye is to publish short stories in online and/or offline magazines or even on your own website. More than just a few writers have started out that way. And there are plenty of writers, especially in the more literary corners of the Fantasy realm – you know, where the awards are handed out – who seamlessly switch between short stories and novels. I thoroughly admire their ease in adapting to the needs of either form. Even Brandon Sanderson, the overlord of the 1,200-page book realm, writes the occasional short fiction. How do Read More …

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Playing the Rejection Game – The Writer’s Edition

2021. A new year, and a new round in the rejection game. You ask how the game works? It’s easy. The goal is to collect as many rejections as possible. So you apply for master classes and writing programs and grants and awards and residencies. You submit your work to agents and editors and publishers. You open yourself up to judgement. It’s never comfortable, but it’s the nature of competition. It’s how the game works. It always unfolds the same way. First, you agonize over whether you should apply at all. Is this class really worth it? Is this magazine Read More …

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Writing Is for Control Freaks

Writing Fantasy is the perfect pastime for us control freaks. We get to play god in our own universe. We control every aspect of the environment. Fauna. Flora. Physics. Magic. Everything. We control every single character. Their abilities, their behavior, their thoughts, their emotions. We also control the beings (human or otherwise) they come in touch with, and we determine the story events. We put our characters through hell (or not), we hurt them, we redeem them, we send them their soulmate – or their worst nightmare. We can even write our own worst enemies into our stories and ridicule Read More …

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NaNoWriMo Redux

NaNoWriMo has ended. Well, to be honest, it ended a while ago, and while I haven’t been posting any musings during the month of November, somehow that hiatus stretched into December. Apparently good habits are hard to build but easy to lose. So, how did NaNoWriMo work out this time? Quite well, I have to say. I finished with 60,027 words, which gives me an average of just over 2,000 words per day, which had been the plan all along. If I’d thought, however, that I would be done drafting one protagonist’s part of the story, let me tell you Read More …