Recent content by pskelding

I once wrote part of a short story and never finished. Then a writer friend was putting together an anthology and asked me to contribute. I pulled out the half-finished story and finished it knowing the entire story in my mind. He could tell exactly, to the sentence where I had stopped and...

Unless those first projects are critical to the completion of your current and future projects why would you want to spend the time rewriting them unless you're being paid to do so? Close third is a skill and it takes time to master just as writing in first WELL does. As in Jim Butcher level...

The antagonist is the hero of their own story, that also means they can be moral and not cold blooded killers. Morals are flexible and not rigid. What is considered moral in China where I live is not considered moral in the USA where I'm from. The protagonist's and antagonist's goals don't...

If you really get the details right for instance how does the regular populace perceive and react to dragons?, then you might have a winner on your hands. Temerarie gets the details right as does Of Bone and Thunder a mashup of fantasy, Vietnam War and dragons. As they say the devil is in the...

On a train returning from Eastern China to my home in the North of China when I saw kilometers and kilometers of farmers burning their fields creating a semi-apocalyptic feeling whilst listening to the Fear Factory album "The Industrialist" was when I outlined an idea for a sentient computer...

Are you talking about that many POV characters? Or just characters? You probably should cut your POV characters down to about 3 if this is your first novel. My first novella has 1 POV character and about 10 characters in total. My first novel moves that up to 3 POV characters and about 20...

I think you've got a good idea. If you ramp the tension of her solo attack up by using mini try-fail cycles it should make for an exciting climax.

I replied to a thread similar to this and will repeat the advice I gave before. Michael Stackpole has an excellent podcast on his free (last I checked) Secrets series in which he dicusses dialogue tags and gives some clear exercises on how to minimize them. I highly recommend it. I've become a...

A well done prologue adds something important to the story that a POV or secondary character doesn't or can't but we the audience need to know. All other prologues are superfluous and unnecessary IMHO.

Daily goals work well for me... 500 to 1000 words a day is a managable task that I can do in under 30 minutes discovery writing or following an outline (my preferred method). I think this works and is recommended by so many writers because it's measurable progress and doable even while working...

Filk covered what I think most would say. I would add that maybe it's not the mountain that breaks the character but maybe an event or encounter (with wild monsters?) on the mountain breaks the character.

Nothing wrong with discovery writing I think my first drafts no matter how well outlined end up discovery written in certain places. An outline is just that... an outline. Many famous writers do an outline to satisfy their publisher and then throw it away during their 1st draft. I'd recommend...

I did know about Penguin buying Author Solutions. I'm not sure what was behind the decision. My previous and current experience working in large corporations would tell me that it was the decision motivated by the profits they were seeing. They'll take several months to decide how to connect it...

Some other new writers - Mazarkis Williams - Emperor's Knife Jonathan Wood - No Hero (it was good but not great) Michael J Sullivan (fellow forum member) - Ririya Revelations (picked up by Orbit!) Great stuff! KJ Parker - Sharps (great, no magic fantasy with a fencing team!)

I work for a company owned by the same parent company as Penguin, so I have *some* bias (it's not a publishing company though). The folks at Penguin and our parent company value professionalism above all else. This move doesn't surprise me very much but it's quite possible that the authors...