sales

Everything Is Sales

When aspiring authors come to me for career advice, the first question I ask them is why they're writing. Making a decent supplemental income is one thing. Making a living is a related, but different ballgame. Publishing a book just to scratch it off your bucket list and impress your…
Fantasy Church

Deliver Us From the Evil Church of Evil

World building is the one element that sets speculative fiction apart from every other category of writing. When designing a secondary world, it’s crucial to establish a foundation of internally consistent principles to help readers suspend their disbelief. With the Easter season upon us, let's zoom in on an often-underdeveloped…
High Tension

High Tension

Of all the elements that go into a story, pacing is among the most misunderstood. Most writers think they know what makes a book feel fast-paced. A majority of them are wrong. Stringing short, clipped sentences into wall-of-text paragraphs within rapid-fire chapters doesn't always give readers a sense of speed.…
Short Story Format

Standard Format

When I first started out writing and submitting short stories, I spent a lot of time and effort learning how to format my manuscripts. Here are all of the short story formatting guidelines I use, collected in one place for your convenience. Cover Page The margins should be one inch…
Character Agency

Character Agency

"What if my characters want to do things  that  sabotage my plot?" That question will baffle outliners. "Your characters are just extensions of your own will," they'll say. "How can they 'want' anything that you don't want?" This misunderstanding stems from the technical differences between authors who construct meticulous outlines…
sentence

Writing Tips: The Sentence Level

Working as a professional writer and editor these past years has not only taught me a lot about writing; it's shown me much that I didn't even suspect I didn't know. Since I always try to have one hand reaching down the ladder to help folks below me up while…
Three-Act Structure

Should You Outline?

Writers come in two broad types: architects who draw up thorough plot outlines before they start writing, and gardeners, or discovery writers, who just dive in and play it by ear. Some writers are natural outliners. Others are natural gardeners. A common complaint of the latter is that they lose…
mentor

The Charity Principle

One of the first things you learn from working around creatives is that we're passionate folk. We kind of have to be, since the main demand of our job is maintaining the conviction that our artistic vision is worth charging people money for. That is to say we tend to…
Writer Ideas

Writer Ideas

"I've got this great idea for a book. You write it, and we'll split the profits 50/50." Writers get that pitch a lot. And when we do, it's hard not to bust out laughing. Because it immediately gives away that the guy making the pitch has never made art for…
AI Writing

A.I. Writing

The same eggheads who said the internet would end censorship, Bitcoin would end state coercion, and Google thermostats would end global warming have also been telling us the A.I. revolution is 10 years away for 50 years now. But the advent of A.I. drawing algorithms like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion…