The making of a horror novelist.
What’s on my bookshelf.
What can writers do in that awkward, unbalanced writing time between mid December and the New Year? I’ve got 22 fun ideas! Update your email signature to link to your website.Read a book totally outside your genre.Stay up way past your bedtime and observe the winter (for those in the northern hemisphere) starry sky. Often … Continue reading December To-Do’s for Writers
1 Gotham Writers has a scary-first-line contest. It’s free to enter, and the winner gets a free Gotham class. I entered today. Here’s the link so you can enter too, but hurry because the deadline is December 1st: https://www.writingclasses.com/contest/frightening-first-line-contest-2019 2 My sweet daughter got me a tee shirt with my 2019 Nanowrimo book title on … Continue reading 5 Non Sequiturs
If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader. Here are the fiction and nonfiction books I’ve read this quarter with my corresponding stabs at coherent, one-sentence reviews. (I’ll try not to cheat and string a bunch of sentences together with and!) The Genius of Solitude by William Alger is a … Continue reading One Sentence Reviews: My 3rd Quarter 2019 Reads
I stripped James Herbert’s classic horror novel The Rats down to its plot outline, and here’s how I did it. The edition of Herbert’s novel that I read has 200 pages. Taking a basic plot structure and fitting the page numbers of The Rats into the structure, I knew I’d be looking for plot points … Continue reading Plot Structure of James Herbert’s The Rats
These are the books I am reading in preparation for my National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) project in November. There are three nonfiction books to expand my knowledge base. (“Write what you know.”) And there are three critter-horror novels to help me get a grip on: What techniques do and do not work well when … Continue reading Research for Nanowrimo 2019
I do quarterly goals instead of monthly or yearly goals. Three months is long enough that I can keep an eye on my overall vision, and short enough that I can regularly evaluate and make adjustments when life throws a curveball. The thing about having a blog is you can stick your goals and your … Continue reading 3rd Quarter 2019 Writing Goals
