Psychedelia Gothique

Breaking Writers Block: Part 2 Writing quickly and writing slowly tap into totally different parts of your brain. If you are usually an ordered and methodical writer, you may find it incredibly useful and productive to cut loose.  Different Approaches to Writing Really Fast  Fast mode, for me, is when the ideas are coming faster than my mental ability to express them properly and I desperately scramble to get words on paper or pixels on screen before losing them completely. Coherence, continuity and common sense are the first things to go out with the window as I struggle to come up with strategies to keep getting some value from the technique. There is value there, even though it may not be apparent at first. With practice, you can learn to control the flow. My top speed is probably about 700 words an hour.  I can imagine someone writing semi-coherently at two or three thousand words and hour. I know people who can type 100 words a minute, but anyone who can think th...

It’s easier to write about stuff when you’re actually going through it – so I’m going to save my blog posts about self-publishing until I am actually back in the throes of doing it. Approach it like a reporter. In fact - that's what I will do with the whole publishing process.  Ergo, Avenging Glory will be coming out as a novel sometime in the next few years. Whether or not it will be published is not the question - the only question is, how? Traditional, hybrid, or self-published?  For the first while, I will be exploring the traditional route. If and when I do hit paydirt and start down that path, the process will be considerably longer – most likely entailing the hiring of an agent, the search for a publisher, working with the agent and/or editor on the mss, and then ultimately publishing the book, a pipeline I have been told can go on for as long as three years. If I self-published the entire project, it could be done in a window as short  as a few days...

The more prolific I've been getting, the more settled I am getting into a particular process of writing that works for me. FIRST DRAFT: Summarize like a madman. Here are the characters and this is the plot - what happens in the story. I'll tinker with the mechanics and milieu to make it as interesting as possible. This is the stage where I'll often decide the style and intent of the story. I keep working on this until I come up with an interesting potential ending. SECOND DRAFT The next draft is to develop the characters, by asking what kind of character would get him or herself into a position like this and why. All the stories I'm writing these days are about relationships. Sometimes parents and children, sometimes siblings, sometimes lovers and sometimes more than one of the above. Creating realistic relationships with a few lines of dialogue is just about the most fun in fiction writing. The quirkier the characters, the more fun this part of the process is. ...