My Intermittent Blog!
Political Systems in Fantasy
With the sudden death of Queen Elizabeth II, who was our monarch for my entire lifetime, my thoughts inevitably turn to the ubiquity of kings and queens in fantasy, and what the alternatives might be. It's easy to see why monarchs are so common in fantasy. Most stories are set in some version of Europe in the period between the fall of the ancient empires of the Near East and Mediterranean, and the rise of industrialism and the revolutions that accompanied it. During this time, monarchy was the norm, and many if not most nations were ruled by a king who was owed fealty by noble lords.Read more...
Getting my shit together - September edition
One of the hardest things about being a writer in the modern world is the sheer number of roles you have to play. It's not enough any more to just write books and send them in to your editor; you have to do a lot of your own marketing as well, including managing your online platform. And of course if you're self-publishing, the list gets even longer, because you're now running your own business, acting as CEO, advertising executive and production editor, among other things.Read more...
Franken-plotting, or The Indecisive Gardener
George R R Martin calls them architects and gardeners; most other writers call them plotters and pantsers. Either way, there's general agreement that all writers fall somewhere on a spectrum between detailed up-front planning and complete seat-of-the-pants improvisation. I fall towards the latter end of the spectrum. I wish I could plot a novel before I start writing—it seems much more efficient—but that doesn't seem to work for me. Instead, I've gravitated towards what I call Franken-plotting.Read more...
Plotting vs Pantsing - it's not either/or
Over the past year or so I've been gearing up to write a new novel, and I've had to rediscover my own writing process all over again. Writing *The Alchemist of Souls* took so long that I barely remember how I got from vague idea to first rough draft, and whilst the two sequels are very recent, they were written so fast it's something of a blur!Read more...
Diagramming your book's conflicts
This weekend I knuckled down to sorting out the overall plot of my work-in-progress. I have a setting, several main characters and some ideas for conflicts, but nothing was pinned down, hence my struggles to get on with writing the book. This is pretty par for the course with me; I tend to get bogged down in plot possibilities because there are so many directions the story could go in and I can't decide which one is best!Read more...