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Today I got an early start and nailed two chapters, bringing the total word count up to 33,549. The two chapters built on each other and also are beginning a transitional phase for the novel. It’s almost like restarting the story, and for our hero’s circumstances it really is. The emotional through-line, however, continues (albeit […]

Lots of folks are participating Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month. It’s a worthy effort to encourage writers to produce a novel in a month (duh!). In this case by novel they mean a work of 50,000 words minimum. Commercially that’s not a novel (80K words minimum), but there is no sense in quibbling. Stringing […]

Some of you may recall The Rules of Writing were a key component for the first ten episodes of The Secrets podcast. The Rules of Writing were originally published in issues 2-21 of my writing newsletter, The Secrets. I’ve finally pulled them from those issues and collected them all in one forty-one page long book. […]

Issue 81 of The Secrets Newsletter went out to subscribers today. The article in this issue, Growth versus Change, takes a look at how many fictional characters change but never grow. I go in depth into techniques and approaches that make identifying growth areas much easier. Characters who change but do not grow do not […]

The Secrets Podcast continues its fourth season. This time around I’m tackling novels and the stuff that takes place while you’re writing one. I’m starting off using Star Wars™ X-wing™ Rogue Squadron™ as my example. It’s a good choice because so many folks have read it, and since it started a series, has all the […]

Jason Penney wrote to mention his podcatcher was having trouble with the Fortress Draconis feed. He suggested using http://www.michaelastackpole.com/?feed=atom&cat=21 as an alternate, which was working for iPodderX. He also made a couple other suggestions which will make managing the files easier, and I’ll put those into place later today. You’ll want to check out Jason’s […]

J. C. Hutchins, the genius behind and author of the wildly successful Seventh Son novels—which he has been podcasting—interviewed me on the most recent of his hiatus-casts. The third, and possibly concluding volume in the trilogy, will debut on 07.07.07. Our discussion ranged all over the place and was a lot of fun. And if […]