Archive for the 'For Novelists' Category
November 14th 2011
Secrets of Writing – Transitions
I don’t often write about the craft of writing – there are a lot of people out there a lot better at it than I am, and they can teach it a lot better than I can, too. But transitions are an aspect of writing I don’t hear discussed a lot, and I think they’re [...]
October 25th 2011
The Skill List Project: Plot Flow
This is another post in The Skill List Project: an attempt to list all the skills involved in writing and selling fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Last time around, I talked about overall plot structure, and how to develop a starting seed into a plot…but I was working on the “big picture” level: the [...]
October 21st 2011
Works In Progress
I’ll be teaching this weekend at the South Carolina Writer’s Workshop Annual Conference. It’s an event I’ve done before and one I love at attend. Great people, talented writers, and a welcoming community. One of the topics I’ll be covering in the course of several panels and workshops I’ll be running is self-editing and revisions, [...]
September 29th 2011
The Skill List Project: Starting to Plot
This is another post in The Skill List Project: an attempt to list all the skills involved in writing and selling fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Last time, I laid out some basic terminology for talking about plot. This time, I’ll look at how to get started on developing a plot: figuring out the [...]
September 25th 2011
About writing for kids
Simon Haynes is the Australian author of the Hal Spacejock series, and the programmer behind yWriter. His latest work is Hal Junior: The Secret Signal, a middle-grade science fiction novel for readers aged 9+. I did a guest blog recently about writing for kids, and I found it hard to stop adding more and more [...]
August 25th 2011
The Skills List Project: Plot Units
This is another post in The Skill List Project: an attempt to list all the skills involved in writing and selling fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. This time around, I promised we’d look at skills related to plotting. This will take several postings to cover; we’ll start with some basic terminology about the units [...]
August 23rd 2011
A Year To Remember
When I first started writing professionally, I had a vision of what my career path would look like. I understood, from all that I had been told by people wiser and more experienced than I, that success wouldn’t come easily, and that the first several years of my career would be a struggle. But I [...]
August 15th 2011
Do You Want to Be a Writer, or Do You Want to Write?
There is a difference. The first is an ambition, the latter a disease. In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what your motivation is. Motivation is motivation; it’s just a matter of how strong it is. People who want to be writers are generally charmed by the idea of being famous, or working from [...]
July 25th 2011
The Skill List Project: The Raconteur Viewpoint
This is another post in The Skill List Project: an attempt to list all the skills involved in writing and selling fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Last time around, we talked about Avoiding Viewpoint Mistakes. This time we’ll look at one of my favorite viewpoints, but one that definitely requires skill: the viewpoint of [...]
July 21st 2011
Thoughts on Creating Magic Systems
I’ve written before, on other blogs (including http://magicalwords.net, a site I maintain with several other fantasy authors) about creating magic systems and what I feel such a system needs to read as “real.” In recent months, though, I’ve been thinking about magic a bit differently, in part because I’m now writing historical fantasy and contemporary [...]
Author Information
S.C. Butler
Butler is the author of The Stoneways Trilogy from Tor Books: Reiffen's Choice, Queen Ferris, and The Magician's Daughter. Find out what Reiffen does with magic, and what magic does with him... Visit site.
James Alan Gardner
James Alan Gardner got his M.Math from the University of Waterloo with a thesis on black holes...and then he immediately started writing science fiction instead. He's been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award as well as the Aurora award (twice). He's published seven novels (beginning with "Expendable"), plus a short story collection and (for street cred) a Lara Croft book. He cares deeply about words and sentences, and is working his way up to paragraphs. Visit site.
David B. Coe
David B. Coe is the author of eleven fantasy novels, including the books of the LonTobyn Chronicle, Winds of the Forelands, and Blood of the Southlands. He has also written the novelization for the Ridley Scott production of ROBIN HOOD, starring Russell Crowe, that is due out in May 2010. In 1999 he received the Crawford Fantasy Award, given annually by the IAFA to the best new author in fantasy. He has a Ph.D. in United States environmental history and lives on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee with his wife and daughters. Visit site.
James Alan Gardner
James Alan Gardner got his M.Math from the University of Waterloo with a thesis on black holes...and then he immediately started writing science fiction instead. He's been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award as well as the Aurora award (twice). He's published seven novels (beginning with "Expendable"), plus a short story collection and (for street cred) a Lara Croft book. He cares deeply about words and sentences, and is working his way up to paragraphs. Visit site.
Simon Haynes
Simon is the author of the Hal Spacejock series, featuring intergalactic loser Hal and his junky sidekick, Clunk. His website contains a number of articles on writing and publishing, and he's also the programmer of several freeware apps including yBook, BookDB and yWriter. In his spare time(!) he helps to run Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Visit site.
James Alan Gardner
James Alan Gardner got his M.Math from the University of Waterloo with a thesis on black holes...and then he immediately started writing science fiction instead. He's been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award as well as the Aurora award (twice). He's published seven novels (beginning with "Expendable"), plus a short story collection and (for street cred) a Lara Croft book. He cares deeply about words and sentences, and is working his way up to paragraphs. Visit site.
David B. Coe
David B. Coe is the author of eleven fantasy novels, including the books of the LonTobyn Chronicle, Winds of the Forelands, and Blood of the Southlands. He has also written the novelization for the Ridley Scott production of ROBIN HOOD, starring Russell Crowe, that is due out in May 2010. In 1999 he received the Crawford Fantasy Award, given annually by the IAFA to the best new author in fantasy. He has a Ph.D. in United States environmental history and lives on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee with his wife and daughters. Visit site.
S.C. Butler
Butler is the author of The Stoneways Trilogy from Tor Books: Reiffen's Choice, Queen Ferris, and The Magician's Daughter. Find out what Reiffen does with magic, and what magic does with him... Visit site.
James Alan Gardner
James Alan Gardner got his M.Math from the University of Waterloo with a thesis on black holes...and then he immediately started writing science fiction instead. He's been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award as well as the Aurora award (twice). He's published seven novels (beginning with "Expendable"), plus a short story collection and (for street cred) a Lara Croft book. He cares deeply about words and sentences, and is working his way up to paragraphs. Visit site.
David B. Coe
David B. Coe is the author of eleven fantasy novels, including the books of the LonTobyn Chronicle, Winds of the Forelands, and Blood of the Southlands. He has also written the novelization for the Ridley Scott production of ROBIN HOOD, starring Russell Crowe, that is due out in May 2010. In 1999 he received the Crawford Fantasy Award, given annually by the IAFA to the best new author in fantasy. He has a Ph.D. in United States environmental history and lives on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee with his wife and daughters. Visit site.
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