Month: June 2017

Excitement and dealing with feedback

My awesome critique partner gave me a pile of suggestions for how I might shorten my manuscript. Here’s my plan for dealing with them.

If you get my monthly digest, you might know that I recently finished the fifth draft of my work in progress (WIP) and enlisted the help of my wonderful critique partner, Anna Kaling, to figure out how to cut 40k words.

Anna got back to me at 3am this morning, and all I could do before work was read her email in a whirlwind of excitement. (Don’t you hate it when real life gets in the way of writing?)

She had some very encouraging things to say, and she suggested some characters and plot threads that she found less than essential to the story.

I was thrilled by her reaction. Then her suggested excisions sank in.

But everything needs to be there!

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Should you write for money or for art?

In the nether-reaches of the internet, shadowy figures argue whether authors who write for money are sellouts. These are their opinions.

If you push aside enough cobwebs, wander down enough dank corridors, and tiptoe through enough iron-bound doors you might find yourself in the nether-reaches of the web where shadowy figures debate the question of whether writing should be about money or art.

I confess I have no strong views on this matter, but that’s not an interesting way to approach a question, so for the purposes of this post let’s pretend I have all the strong views.

In case your socks got too wet and your candle burned out before you reached this nether-web, here are some of the arguments that may or may not be bandied about.

Against art: Writing only thinking about yourself is self-indulgent.

Against money: Trying to write what you think readers want is the best way to produce vanilla, derivative stories.

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Why you should be scared of me

A mean person on Twitter this week told me I wasn’t scary. I absolutely am scary and here are the reasons why.

Twitter this week was out to smash my dreams.

First, a mean person told me I wasn’t Batman. Fortunately this was followed by a collection of lovely people telling me that if I wanted to be Batman then I could be Batman.

Then another mean person told me I wasn’t scary.

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How to be a writer: 13 required quirks

I was honoured when the lovely Lucy of BlondeWriteMore invited me to write a guest post, and I thought I’d share the intelligence I’ve gathered in my time undercover as a writer. (Yes, I’m watching Burn Notice again. How did you know?)

I had a lot of fun writing this piece, and I hope you have fun reading it: How to be a writer: 13 required quirks.

Eighty-three percent of people want to be writers, but not just anyone can be.

For the past six months I have been deep undercover in the online world of writers, learning their peculiar ways in order to better mimic them and hopefully one day become one of them.

My research has led me to the conclusion that there are thirteen quirks required to be a writer. Today they will be shared for the first time.

1: You must be crazy about cats

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Good advice for life (and Sharknado)

In which I reflect on my morning’s activities and decide strategy is not my strong suit. Plus, sharks in tornados.

#1: If you’re going to watch Sharknado with your twitter friends while live-tweeting, don’t do it during your usual blog-writing time.

#2: If you’ve just watched Sharknado and have to blog, don’t promise yourself you’re not going to blog about sharks. Because you are going to blog about sharks, even if you’ve done it before.

#3: If you’re sleepy when you’re blogging, don’t trust your spellchecker when it tells you that “haev” is a perfectly acceptable word.

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