Category: Writing Tips


Book Prices

World-famous, multiple-time New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia recently posted a rant. This is nothing new; he rants a lot, though the difference between him and your average Internet Joe is that his rants are educational snark and not simply complaints. (Well, other than stuff like complaining about government bureaucracy, but hey, if my wife were treated that way, I’d be ticked off too.)

This particular rant was about something I talk about a lot too: the pricing of books. You can click here to read what Correia wrote (language warning), but the gist of it was that someone posted a review of one of his novellas without reading it, simply so he could complain about the price. It seems that a 30,000-word novella written by a very big-name author in a moderately big-name IP (Warmachine), with full-color illustrations and accessible to people who know nothing about said IP, is not worth the huge, huge cost of . . . five bucks.

Similarly, there’s a member of a Facebook writing support group I’m in who has said multiple times that he won’t bother reading any ebook priced higher than $3.99, because “That’s how much mine is and I doubt anyone worked any harder than me.”

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You may or may not have heard the latest faux controversy about J. K. Rowling. No, it has nothing to do with her characters. Instead, it’s a Huffington Post writer named Lynn Shepherd complaining that Rowling is such a good author that she’s crowding out everyone else. She tells Rowling that she should just stop writing and give other people a chance. If you don’t want to click on her article, here’s the summary: Rowling has too much of a market share, which means every book she publishes is a book overlooked from another author who hasn’t become famous yet.

There has been a lot of pushback so far. I won’t post more than one link, mainly because the BBC’s article has more than enough links from successful authors who say this is ridiculous. I wasn’t even going to do more than link to that article, because every single point has been refuted multiple times by the authors linked there, and that’s just a small sample so far. What could I add? Continue reading

Stories with Messages

Currently, the SF&F blogs are embroiled in a mild (well, for some of them, very much not mild) tizzy over whether or not stories should be written with a particular cause in mind. I’m not going to mention what the specific argument is, because 1) if you don’t already know, you probably don’t want to be involved in the first place; and 2) it really doesn’t matter, because I want to talk about cause-fiction in general.  Continue reading

History and Stories

I can go on and on about stories until my voice goes raw or my hands cramp up, depending on how I’m talking to you. Because of that, it often surprises many people that I don’t have a single degree in literature. For now, my highest degree is actually in history.

Why is that? Well, I maintain that a history degree — assuming that you’ve had a wide-ranging focus and look at many different cultures — is one of the best fields to truly teach you how to write. That’s because most lit degrees teach you about other books, but they don’t tend to teach you about people. Make no mistake, both history and stories are fundamentally about people. Continue reading

Agents and Heroines

It’s been a while since my last Agents of SHIELD review, which could be interpreted as a lack of enthusiasm. This is true, to an extent. I haven’t been wowed. I’ve been entertained enough to give it a viewing when I need a break, but not so entertained that I feel like talking about it afterwards. I did catch up this Thanksgiving, though, so I figured I’d write a review. Spoilers ahead if you care about that, mainly for the episode “The Well.”  Continue reading

One of my authors just submitted a book. Well, I say she’s one of mine, but so far we haven’t engaged in actual financial business. She’s an old friend that I give advice to and help craft things. I haven’t had time to go over her book, but I’ve seen her writing and I hand-picked her for an upcoming series I’m managing next year (so she will be one of my authors, officially, in about six months). I’ve also helped her craft her cover letter, pitch, and so on.

She just bit the bullet on a submission she’s been putting off for literally years now. Now she has to wait for up to a year to get a response. It can be an intimidating thing. In fact, it can be a stressful thing — for good reason, though not a “good enough” reason. Continue reading

When to Use Dialog Tags?

Dialog tags are sometimes tricky to use. When to use them? Why? Where? How much?

I’m not going to assume you don’t know what dialog tags are. I’m not even going to go into grammar and whether you should ever use “said” versus something else. I’m just going to give you four rules of thumb that I give my authors.  Continue reading

Having just spotted another one, I decided to detail this particular peeve. I can’t say it’s a personal one, because I’ve never met an editor who said they didn’t mind it.

If you send in a query letter and/or manuscript and say that your work is copyrighted, I’m 99% certain to reject it. It’s very insulting and shows that you are an amateur. Continue reading

Sorry, Marvel. ALL heroes are super.

“Superpower” is a technical term used by some writers and editors, myself included. It’s awkward when used in superhero fiction, but generally speaking it’s a great term packed with a lot of information.

Your protagonist must have a superpower. Your secondary characters usually need them too. Your villain always has a superpower, but an antagonist doesn’t always need it. (Yes, there’s a difference between a villain and an antagonist. There’s also a difference between main characters, protagonists, heroes, and viewpoint characters, but that’s another blog post.) It’s advisable to have a kryptonite as well, but that’s not as important as long as you’ve practiced.

So what is this superpower thing? Flight? Super-strength? The ability to leap tall buildings faster than a speeding bullet while running alongside a train?

It can be, but it’s not necessarily supernatural. A character’s superpower is defined as anything they can do better than anyone else in the story. Similarly, a character’s kryptonite is that which forms an obstacle they cannot overcome. Continue reading

Highs and Lows

You may have heard of the phrases “high fantasy” and “low fantasy.” Or perhaps you haven’t; while they’re used very commonly in an academic sense, they aren’t as common outside those circles. As is so often the case, this leads to some confusion in the definitions. And so I decided to give you a quick overview of the topic. That’s what this blog is for, after all! Continue reading