Firstly, generic apologies for not posting for ninteen days. Sheesh. Blogs are funny things, much like gardens: ignore them for a few weeks and they’ve all gone to seed. Or spam, as it were. Anyway. Fall is in full swing in Seattle, and it’s the delicious part where days of pouring rain altrenate with days …
Tag Archive: Changeling
Jun 28
She’s Not There…
I thought it was bad when my Dad turned into an abusive monster, my parents split, and my Mum dragged us back to America. I thought it was bad living in the most shite town ever, Colorado Springs. Hell, I thought it was bad when my sister Cassie disappeared off the face of the earth …
Jun 21
Cannot Be Unthought.
When I went to undergrad at Colorado College, I was a writing tutor. I remember one day a girl came in with a literary theory paper about The Cat in the Hat. Her assignment was to pick a critical point of view and analyze The Cat in the Hat from said point of view. She’d …
May 29
The first rule about Fight Club….
So, I was just writing a fight scene in “Changeling,”* a real fists-flying-guns-drawn fight scene. It made me think of two things: 1. I don’t write fight scenes very often. In Freedomland, there are no actual FIGHT scenes. There are people dying gruesomely scenes and blowing stuff up scenes, but no hand-to-hand combat, period. 2. …
May 26
Searching for my readers…
This past weekend I spent most of my time in Capitol Hill at the Richard Hugo House‘s writing conference, Finding Your Readers in the 21st Century. Its focus wasn’t craft, but rather marketing, publishing, publication, and all those other things that writers do that aren’t writing. This is something I’d been hungering for, and I …
Apr 05
Blatant Balladry
So, I suppose it’s time I talked about Novel No. 2. It’s tentatively titled Changeling, because I love me some single-word titles. Currently, it consists of a few more than 50,000 words of text (thanks, NaNoWriMo), a couple of outlines, and a bunch of research into the wacky, wacky world of British folklore. Specifically, I’ve …
Jan 16
Scene vs. Summary
One of the basic tricks in a writer’s Bag-O-Tricks is knowing when to use scene, and when to use summary. What the crap does that mean? Well, scene is like a movie: the events are happening in real time, you’re watching them, there we go. It may or may not involve direct dialogue. For example: …