Building Worlds Takes More Than One Book

Building Worlds Takes More Than One Book I have heard of people spending hours and hours doing nothing but building worlds for their characters to play in. They sacrifice time creating those actual characters and creating stories for them to exist in all for the sake of a more detailed legal system or better rules of magic or whatever. I suspect, for those people, the fun of creation is such that the actual story writing might be a chore. Sort of like being the Dungeon Master (DM) versus the Campaign Party (CP) in DnD. The DM creates the dungeon and all of its inherent challenges and rewards. The DM loves torturing and making the characters work. The CP meanwhile, is […]

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Get Published Episode 122 – Gail Carriger Talks Series Writing

One of the best things about going to conventions for me is getting the chance to talk to people. For example, 3-years ago at Balticon, I was lucky enough to meet and talk to Gail Carriger. The unfortunate part of that was, I met her on the very last day, at lunch, just prior to leaving for home. I took that opportunity to invite Gail onto Get Published and she graciously agreed to an interview. That was episode 47 which aired December 25th, 2010. Ever since that conversation, I have watched Gail’s career with interest, hoping that our paths would cross again one day. Imagine my delight when I learned that not only will Gail and I both be at […]

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Get Published Episode 93 – Putting Experiences into Your Writing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, about how my own experiences have affected my writing. I have looked at several of my better stories and I have been able to pick out things I’ve learned, people I have known and even different events in my life. That is not to say I’ve recorded those things in the stories, but used the experiences to provide flavour to the writing. Definitely not word for word, but more in how they would cause my characters to act and the story to develop. So, I decided it would be fun to have a few people join me to discuss this. As often happens, I was only able to line up the schedule with a […]

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Guest Post – Books that Inspired – Immortality through Writing – by Valerie Griswold-Ford

There were always books in my house.  My parents are both voracious readers, and they imparted that love of words and stories on to their children.  I can remember, when I was still very young, listening to my mother read us The Jungle Book and Bambi (the original novels, not the Disney versions), as well as Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, among others.  The idea of being able to write and influence the world, even after death, was an amazing idea to me.  The fact that I could tell a story and, hundreds of years in the future, someone else could read that same story was, to me, the true proof of immortality. The books that truly fired my urge to write, though, was the Dragonriders […]

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