About Writing Archives - Page 2 of 54

Reforming an old habit

Posted on February 2, 2023 by Michell

How does one go about reforming an old habit? In some cases (usually negative cases) the old habit comes easily. I think about things like procrastinating. It’s so easy to simply do nothing. Rebuilding a productive habit is much harder. It takes effort. It takes planning. Most of all, it takes diligence. Breaking the old habit in the first place I will admit, I have the problem of overcommitting. I’m usually good, going 100 miles an hour for several months, doing a ton of different things, getting pulled in multiple directions. The problem is, it always catches up with me (eventually). When that happens, things come crashing down. It’s almost like coming down from the world’s biggest sugar-high. After the […]

False Start Shouldn’t Mean Full Stop

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Michell

Having a false start shouldn’t mean a full stop. It happens and when it does, you should review what happened, pick yourself up and start again. There have been many times I’ve had to rewrite sections of a book when I’m in the editing phase. Never have I had a book where I’ve started. Thrown away what I’ve written. Started again, only to throw that away too. Until now, that is. It’s been no secret that I struggled during the recent plague years. Very little writing was done although I did think about it a lot (usually with guilt weighing me down that I wasn’t writing more). I came up with a solid plot premise for Mik Murdoch 5. I […]

Try Something New

Posted on May 20, 2022 by Michell

One of the many things I enjoy about writing is the ever-existing opportunity to try something new. It could be writing in a different genre, it could be trying to plan a novel (or pantster one) or it could be a new PoV. That is probably why you see me writing in so many different genres. I come up with a story idea and it sort of tells me the genre it belongs in. Scouts of the Apocalypse is a prime example of that. I’d never even considered writing horror before I got that story idea. But my Scouts enjoyed the campfire version of it so much, I knew I had to write it for real. A trilogy of horror […]

More Writing Adventures – Pantster or a Planner

Posted on May 12, 2022 by Michell

I know I’ve talked about this before, but it is something that’s been on my mind quite a bit the past couple weeks. Am I a pantster or a planner? The answer, I’ve discovered, is that I’m both. Much like I will write a story in the genre that best fits it, I will also employ either a pantster or a planner methodology as the occasion demands. For example, my first published novel, Mik Murdoch: Boy Superhero, was completely written in pantster-style. There were many reason for that, too. First, I wrote that book as a NaNoWriMo novel, which totally lends itself to pantster writing. Second, it was a story that I had been thinking about for years. I had […]

« 1 2 3 4 … 54 »