Still Working and Worth It

Don’t you want to be a professional writer? Happily typing away at a brisk pace when the mood hits you, calmly sipping your drink of choice as you sit in a beautiful, clean room with plenty of natural lighting, overlooking placid scenery?

Ok, hold on a sec…

Ok, ok, now that I’ve got that off my chest…

I’m about two weeks into working on the current novel, and let me tell you, it is work. It is wonderful work, but that picture of just happily typing away? Of waiting for a muse?

Yeah. Not so much.

Continue reading “Still Working and Worth It”

I’ve heard it all before.

Sometimes I feel this way when it comes to writing. I’ll sit down at the keyboard… and everything is just so derivative. Like, this is just Hamlet with lions. That’ll never sell.

Oh, wait. That’s Lion King.

See, so often writers can get hung up on originality. And it’s true; you don’t want to copy other people. At the same time, a smart guy once said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” So let me give you a little writing tip, free from me:

Be less concerned with writing an original story. Be more concerned with writing a story in an original way. Continue reading “I’ve heard it all before.”

We don’t need those fifty pages!

We encamped that night at Garion Danwsbrook.

And so began the saga that would become The Keeper of Tales. I mentioned a few weeks ago that what I first wrote evolved quite a bit through revisions. In fact, the first fifty pages are simply gone in what you’ll have the opportunity to read starting March 1, 2021.

How… how could you just chop off fifty pages?!

I mean, sure, if you watch deleted scenes from movies, you can usually see why they were cut. Maybe they didn’t move the story along. Maybe the acting was off. Maybe they just had to cut something for the sake of time. Cutting a single scene can make a lot of sense. Fifty pages, though? That’s a good chunk of a book to simply cease to exist!

And truthfully, a lot was lost when I cut those pages. Continue reading “We don’t need those fifty pages!”