The alternative title for this post was going to be “everybody loves love.” What am I talking about? Apparently one of the top two selling books of the Star Wars franchise of all time, even after all these years… is The Courtship of Princess Leia...
FULL METAL JACKET AND THE HERO’S JOURNEY It was the 30th anniversary of Full Metal Jacket this week. At the urging of of my co-author, I finally watched it. It took 3 evenings with Netflix (Netflix and chill at my house only happens after the kids are down and...
It’s hard to write that first hook. You want to grab your reader, drag them right into your story…but how? I struggled to do this so I just started pulling books off the shelf. Some of these opening paragraphs (or even just the first sentence) really...
I was stuck. I needed to write a scene to get my protagonist out of a sticky situation and I didn’t know what to do. It was literally the “man in the hole” scenario where I had made my alien stronger and stronger and the situation was getting more...
For the folks who build houses, repair complex machinery, or bake wedding cakes, they spend years to learn, and train, and master their craft. (For my dayjob, I had three years of graduate school, a grueling multi-day certification exam, and then years of...
When I was getting in my daily wordcount for NaNoWriMo, I was often struck by how much writing felt like running. At the early stage in both activities, MORE is just MORE. So more words tended to just be good to get down, regardless of the quality. Similarly, my...
People like me need structure. Even if I did write my entire NaNoWriMo project by the seat of my pants, I like to know that the overall story spine is there, and that everything works. Listening to the Story Grid podcast all year and working through the book, The...
Ok Wrimos, you’ve made it to the magical milestone of finishing your first draft. It was awesome, you celebrated, you took a snapshot of your winner certificate. But now what? If you’re like me, you’re probably slightly nauseated at the editing and...
