Tag Archives: writing
I’m Teaching a NANOWRIMO Prep class

I’m Teaching a NANOWRIMO Prep class

This October, I’ll be teaching a NANOWRIMO Prep class for the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. In the past I’ve offered similar classes (alone and in conjunction with Aaron Allston) to get writers all organized for National Novel Writing Month. The task of writing a 50,000 word novel inside […]

Read more
Overwhelming Fiction!

Overwhelming Fiction!

Let me dust off the blog here. One of the reasons I’ve not been blogging with any regularity is that I’ve been heavily involved with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. I’m the director of the Science Fiction/Fantasy wing of the Center’s Your Novel Year program. This is an […]

Read more
High Intensity Writing Workshop No. 6

High Intensity Writing Workshop No. 6

Despite the fact that this will be one of the shorter exercises, it’s one of the most important you can use to develop characters and their unique voices. Previously I’ve had you work on dialogue so you could avoid the “he said” tags which make dialogues choppy. By the end of this exercise you’ll understand […]

Read more
High Intensity Writing Workout No. 5

High Intensity Writing Workout No. 5

This week’s workout expands a great deal on what you did in HIWW No. 4 because it’s all about character. Last week I had you creating a basic character, listing out a handful of facts about her, generate some goals and story ideas, then go back and change one fact. From there you got to […]

Read more
High Intensity Writing Workout No. 4

High Intensity Writing Workout No. 4

A lot of writers—especially beginning writers—choose to believe that writers fall into one of two camps: Plot-based writers and Character-based (or Organic™) writers. The problem with this view is that it suggests that one can have plots without characters and vice versa. And, I suppose, this is true in a general sense; but not in […]

Read more
High Intensity Writing Workout No. 2

High Intensity Writing Workout No. 2

One of the goals of any good writing is to pack a lot of information into as few words as possible. The biggest culprit in preventing this is the verb “to be.” The reason is simple: the verb is the lowest-common verb—it applies almost anywhere. But it is weak and flabby and applied too broadly. […]

Read more
My Latest Book: The Crusader Road

My Latest Book: The Crusader Road

The Crusader Road is my latest book. It’s my first venture writing fiction in the Pathfinder™ universe. I had a lot of fun writing the book, and I think it turned out pretty well. If you want an unbiased opinion on that issue, you can read the review at Roqoo Depot. One of the most […]

Read more