Same Old Tricks

Blog Post No. 545

Now that I’m finally getting back to some writing (and editing) I’ve been thinking more about all the tricks, tropes, and clichés that artists use to fool the audience into feeling emotions. Music swells, movie editors cut to closeups, and writers do something that I try to do naturally and not analyze too much in case I get too aware of it and somehow ruin my ability to write. (Or give the protagonist some inner dialogue to flesh out what they’re feeling, or my preferred method of giving them an overly obvious expression to show the reader how they feel).

Not Finished Yet

Blog No. 308

I was hoping to be able to say that I was finished the first draft of The Neon Heart by this post, but as you can guess, I’m not quite there yet. I’ve been getting some really good writing in with a couple of regular meetings with Christian each week, but with a load of other things on my plate (surprise, surprise) and some bad habits from another summer of slacking, I haven’t quite gotten there yet. One of the reasons is that the story is getting a bit longer than anticipated. Not by much, but when I started, I was planning on somewhere between thirty and thirty-five thousand words. the first draft is going to be more than that, but that’s a good thing. The story is dictating the length and the extra word count gives me more room to cut in the edits. It does mean that I’m not finished, though. I would have liked to be finished by now.

Little Books

Blog No 156

Each week I sit down and write one of these blog posts. When I’m done (and it’s posted) I spend the time before the next one furiously brainstorming what to write about. Last week, due to the book I was given by my mother, I decided to write about book lengths. Instead I wrote about audio books, my mother, and a little about my brief time in another city. I don’t know how I got so far off track, but it happens, and I am happy with how that post turned out. Now I want to try again (this time more focused) and explore the topic of book lengths. I can only hope I manage to stay on track. You may need to check out the last post Thoughts about Books for this to make sense.

Currently I am working on the final layout issues of the short story collection that Christian and I are publishing. I’m also a third of the way through writing my first novel and picking away at a novella that I’m rewriting, hoping it will be the start of a series that has been on my mind for my years. They are all writing, but the lengths are very different and therefore they are written in different way. The story structure, the detail, and the plot vary greatly based on the length of each publication.

The Second Time is never the same

Blog No. 142

I am a big fan of the book Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. I wouldn’t call it my favourite, but I do like it enough to have given it two reviews on this blog in the past. It’s a fun ride that swerves sharply down memory lane. Highly praised and being adapted into a Stephen Spielberg film, I don’t really need to go into too much detail about it. The second offering from the author is called Armada. It has been out for a couple of weeks and even before it was finished, the movie rights were snatched up. Excitement has been rising since the book’s announcement shortly after the publication of Ready Player One. Everything was pointing to Armada being another fun, reference laden sci-fi story. I expected to love it, ordered it as a hard cover, and waited eagerly for it to arrive.