Recent content by Jenna St. Hilaire

Ophiucha, it's been months since I logged in here faithfully--not because I've not wanted to, but because I've just had a million distractions and three novels I'm trying to get revised. But I live in Bellingham, WA, and if there's anything I can do for you, let me know. I run a small writers'...

I liked what Ravana said. Outlines always seem so necessary to me--I'd come up with a complete list of scenes before ever writing the first line, if I could. The trouble is, I can't. Imagination doesn't start to flow until I'm actually writing. Most of the time, I can't even really come up...

My guess is that "easy-gaited" refers to a pacer rather than a trotter. When trotting, a horse moves its right fore and left hind leg together, then its left fore and right hind. Pacers move left fore and hind together, than right fore and hind. I understand that pacing is a much smoother gait...

Well, to be droll... I'm Jenna St. Hilaire over there, too. I used to be librarylily everywhere, thanks to my everlasting love for Hermione Granger and Lily Evans Potter, but was convinced by publishing industry blogs to start using my Real Live Name on the Internet. The convincing was well...

My complete novel began life as a NaNoWriMo piece. Took me one month to write, and a year and a half to revise. :P Last year, I tried writing the sequel in November. It was awful. I cared too much about the characters and how they sounded. I've now thrown out probably 55,000 words and started...

Real-world events and ideas are just some of the options available to fantasy writers, as far as I can see--as long as there's no libel of real people, it's all fair game for inspiration. I don't do it much, myself. At least, not consciously. Probably because of my intense distrust of most...

Having disappeared for days at a time recently, perhaps I ought to explain. I'm in the process of moving house and will be for the next few weeks, though hopefully I'll be able to stop in occasionally. :) Thanks for being here, fellow scribes!

Smoke and mirrors. :) Honestly, writing is just about the most frustrating, difficult process I can imagine. I'm procrastinating on a novel right this minute, and I've successfully finished two. It takes thousands of hours of practice to perfect your craft, and there's little substitute for...

I have a laptop, a little Dell, and Scrivener's beta for Windows (the full release is due out this month, I think. The Mac version has been around for a couple of years, and I believe a Linux version is also in development.) I am so spoiled. Pen and notebook just hardly work for me anymore. :)...

Great question. :) I like my names to mean something relevant to the character, when possible, though it's tricky to do without being desperately obvious. While behindthename.com is my first go-to, I've done things like resorting to words from other languages, letter-scrambling, hunting up...

Thanks, TWErvin2 and Ophiucha! I should've remembered China Mieville; his Un Lun Dun was an excellent book and I'd certainly like to read some of his adult fiction eventually. Lovecraft is another one I should have thought of. And of course I've read both Pratchett and Adams without knowing what...

I'm really glad it was helpful, Lavender. And thanks for the blog follow! I'm trying to accept your friendship request, too, but the button doesn't seem to be working... I will as soon as I can figure it out, though. :)

It's been fun to read through this and see what you all think and believe. I'm Catholic. :) I'd never before heard that most fantasy authors are atheists or agnostic, but that's fascinating if true, especially as I'd have guessed the opposite. Most of my acquaintance has been with the...

If you avoid much description of feelings and instead show actions and conversations that suggest the romantic direction, you should be able to avoid both the heavy cheesiness and the problem of things happening too fast. So instead of saying that 'she couldn't understand why she suddenly cared...

I've gotten exactly three rejection letters, after sending out exactly four queries. (The fourth has been silent long enough to consider a rejection.) And to be very, very honest, I find every last one difficult to get over. It took me months to write that query, and I've polished every line of...