Recent content by Penpilot

I don't think what I do is anything special, but for my climaxes, it generally unfolds like this. Come up with plan, execute plan, plan fails. come up with new plan on the fly, and execute new plan. What you do specifically depends on the type of story you're telling and the details of your...

Reddit is a... weird... place. Each subreddit has it's own personality. Some places are cool. Some are not. Some times you get a genuine interaction. Sometimes you encounter people who only want to hear unconditional affirmation. I think one of the worst aspects of it is there are people who go...

Umm... not really. I'd imagine they'd all be looking at me like this.

I've found learning structure to be very freeing. Part of learning to write is learning to organize your thoughts and ideas in a way that makes sense. Structure helps with that. It's only limiting if you let it be limiting. Everything has a basic shape, houses, cars, wheels, computer programs...

After the first draft, I start with big picture stuff and the move my way down to little picture stuff. Big picture is stuff like plot and character arcs. Little picture stuff is like sentence structure and word choice. Edits are never linear. I sometimes have to jump up a level if I forget...

How does that compare to Scrivener? I've been working with Scrivener for years, and looking at DabbleWriter, on the surface it looks to be similar except way more expensive.

I'm a terrible speller. When I started taking writing seriously many-many years ago, my punctuation was terrible. I'm much better now, and how I got better was simply by writing a lot. Any time I would encounter a punctuation problem, I would look up the rule I was having trouble with, and then...

When I worked primarily in Word, I would have revision numbers for that one large file. Eg Novel-V001. But then I realized it was easier to work with smaller files. So instead, I would split a book into its chapters with each chapter having it's own folder. So, a chapter would be named like...

This is a bit tangential, but hopefully there's something useful to be gleaned from it. I grew up playing various sports. In terms of success, failure, and pressure, one of the keys I found for handling things was in repeating the following statement to myself. "Control the things you can...

Many-many years ago, my first book had an ending where the heroes were facing an army of the dead. After watching a documentary on the Great Wall of China, I got the idea for my third book, which involved a great wall that guarded the known lands from mysterious creatures known as the the...

IMHO, you identify and sharpen your writing voice by simply writing and revising. Finding your voice is kind of like going out and finding yourself as a person. When you're first starting out, you'll try on lots of different hats. You'll be influence by what you read, by what you see, etc...

In the writing sphere you're going to run into all sorts of personalities with something to say about you or about something you created. Some will be worth listening to. Others will not be worth the air spent to tell them to sit on a bag of dick-shaped tacks. Some can be tough, but fair. Some...

I was just reading through the new post in this thread, and it triggered a memory of a phrase I heard used during a sports broadcast, which I though was pretty cool, when a player had a bit of a brain fart. That phrase was "mental vapor lock" derived from engine vapor lock. Engine vapor lock is...

I have a CompSci degree, (but it's been a long time since I used it) and my initial reaction is their brain crashed, and there's no getting out of it until they do a hard reboot. To me, it's not a momentary pause. To me, what you describe is akin to bottle-necking.

For me, it depends. I think something like that best fits stories with a lighthearted slant or instances where a lighthearted tone is being conveyed. It's hard for me to imagine it being used in a dramatic scene, because seeing something like that on the page reminds me of comicbooks and...