All over the interwebs, it’s “What was it like writing your first novel?”

And the canned answer is: “It was like having a baby.”

Is writing a novel really like having a baby? Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to get through my first draft, I put a few worldbuilding projects on the backburner. And I’m glad I did.

One of those projects was to develop a calendar. Now that I’m in the editing phase, it needs done now. Or else making fixes during later revisions will be a pain.

I first mentioned the madcap idea of creating my own calendar for Five Rings and went into detail with the actual days of the week here. Read the rest of this entry »

Last call folks!: If you want in on the Novel-Push Initiative, drop a message below.

For those of you already signed up, now’s a great time to do some pre-meditation on what you’ll be writing. After all, NPI is only one day away (yes, April’s one of those damnable months with only thirty days). 

For me, I think fine-tuning is key. It really helps my fingers fly later if I have that group of characters that the MC will be meeting soon fleshed out now; where they live/how they operate/back-stories/who they know, etc. I try to scrutinize my societies’ social mores and tweak them until they make more sense.

I’ll also daydream upcoming scenes in different ways from many different perspectives to better line up future events and figure out how to best narrate scenes without losing reader interest and key information. And (if I’m lucky) maybe even figure out ways to squeeze in some fun facts along the way without making it seem too much like exposition.

Are you preparing? If so, how?

Once upon a time, I was feeling down. But I tried to turn a negative into something positive by making a goal-oriented checklist that day.

Now, I’m feeling much better. So let’s see how I did:

X – Challenge 1: Argue with that little voice inside my head that keeps telling me I’ve no business writing a novel.

I haven’t been feeling insecure about my writing at all. In fact, I keep surprising myself with what’s pouring from my fingertips.

X – Challenge 2: Find time for my book. My free time just isn’t cutting it. Not even close. Whenever I get geared up for writing, something always seems to come up that demands my immediate attention. So I suppose I have to make time by sacrificing something, somehow.

While I still don’t have much time for my book, it’s true that I tend to squander my time if I have a lot of it, whereas I make the most of my time when I don’t have much. Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! probably says it best. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everyone. I want to be honest. I’m not feeling very good about my writing at the moment.
So I’ve created a list of challenges. Read the rest of this entry »

Izzit the last day of world-building month, already?

I guess I’ve been taking this past week easy. Oh well…

Then today will be all about random worldbuilding topics.

Milkfin: The most common freshwater fish. Looks like a black and white koi. (see? random! lol)

Okay, let’s try this a different way.

A chain reaction. Like a game of dominoes! I’ll start by explaining something, and if I mention something new in there, I’ll go on to explain that, too. Let’s see how far that gets me before I run out of new terms in my explanations or get sick of it.  :P

What to start with? Hm… How about the ancient rules? Read the rest of this entry »

A theory:

Is there any such thing as ‘bad’ worldbuilding? I’ve read that the only bad worldbuilding is when it hurts the progress of a story. But what about when somebody starts adding pointless stuff after their story is already done, stopping them from writing another story? Or what if they start adding stuff so obscure, they’ll never ever use it? What if they get so obsessed with worldbuilding, they can’t have a square kilometer of land without some kind of attraction/description attached to it?

I suspect everything we create for our stories—every single thing we worldbuild—should have something to do with at least two other already existing things in our story, or be accompanied by two very good reasons. That should help tighten the vision while keeping focus on the plot, and simultaneously activate the ‘synergy between rules’ to make the world seem more ‘alive’, as I was talking about here. (Yes, even my crimson moon has two reasons for existing. lol.)

So we have to make tough choices. Like, I wasn’t going to include dragons at all. Until something in my head ‘clicked’ and a set of mystic dragons worked very well as the fitting puzzle-piece for a particular part of the story. Read the rest of this entry »