Category: About Writing

I attended ConVersion 24 last weekend and I’m pleased to say it was well-worth the $60 I spent to go. What was ConVersion 24 you might ask?  Simply put, it is a Science Fiction and Fantasy convention held in Calgary every fall.  This year it was August, next year it will be in October (as I understand it). The guests were Timothy Zahn, KA Bedford and Jennie Breeden.  My friend Simon Rose was also there speaking at the Children’s Programming section and participating in a panel on Marketing oneself. I sat in on both Timothy Zahn’s and KA Bedford’s panels and I was very happy to hear about their daily writing routines.  They both said that they write between 1 […]

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You’ve just completed your masterpiece, you’ve researched a publisher or an agent and you’ve sent in your work as per the submission requirements.  Now what? You could do like I did with my first manuscript and sit in anxious anticipation waiting to get word back… and lose sleep and maybe even some of your sanity.  Or you could start a new project. Are you getting any sense of which way I think you might want to go yet? Yes, I’ll admit it, I did do the first choice once.  Or was it twice?  Either way, I was going great guns right up until I sent the manuscript out.  Then… nothing.  That’s right, my productivity came to a complete standstill.  What’s […]

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I like to plot the stories I’m writing.  I know that isn’t everyone’s style, but it’s the way I typically work.  I say typically because my current work in progress was not plotted.  At least, not fully plotted.  I had a pretty clear vision of the story line, but I hadn’t worked out all the details. So, I’m busy writing the story, taking it in the direction I wanted it to go, and then last night I realized that somewhere along the line the story got away from me.  When I say that I mean, I’m not quite clear where it will go next. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it either. I had a brief ‘Now what?’ moment […]

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One of the more difficult things for me to do is give my characters their own unique ‘voice’.  I’m not talking dialogue here, at least, not exactly.  It’s more about writing dialogue that lets the reader know who is speaking without having to put in tags to tell them. Does that make sense? Let me put it another way… in most dialogue, you get things like ‘Dan said’ or ‘Sally asked’.  But what if you have several characters speaking?  Or maybe you have a long session of dialogue.  Do you really want to write ‘Dan said’ and ‘Sally said’ every time they actually speak?  Not only that, but don’t you want to be able to have something said and have […]

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