Psychedelia Gothique

This post Includes Game of Thrones Final Season Spoilers After reading the A Song of Fire and Ice books, I started following Game of Thrones. Been watch faithfully since Season One Episode One. Subscribed to HBO for ten years to get where we are now.  The last few episodes have rendered the entire exercise a colossal waste of time, money, and talent.  Game of Thrones  has become instantly outdated and irrelevant. The show runners can talk all they want about having planted the seeds of what the Mother of Dragons would become from the beginning, but the point is, Daenerys, as played by Emilia Clarke, evolved and the writers didn’t.   The world we live in evolved and the issues we care about changed dramatically over the past 25 years. But the show runners chose not to adapt along with it. They made no attempt to weave our moral awakening into the storyline, instead, choosing to be blind to the forces and deaf to the voices that have blossomed in our soci...

Not all writer’s blocks are equal. Sometimes they are all inclusive – dictating that your mind will shut down as soon as you try to write anything. This is the famous blank page syndrome of classic writer’s block. Some stop you from writing altogether while others thrive on misdirection – allowing you to write, but sending you down the wrong paths (more like labyrinths than huge walls or electric fences). There are more writer’s blocks than there are writers and everyone you face is likely to be different. So there cannot be one cure for writers block. For me, writer’s blocks are more likely to be project specific – they come as a direct result of having worked myself into a corner. It’s almost impossible to get enough distance to see what I have done to create the problem for myself. And problems you can’t perceive can be very hard to solve. When that happens, you need to find workarounds to get yourself going again. During my fourth draft of my Work In Progress, I...

I remember a story I read in Asimov’s when I was just starting out that blew me away and had a huge influence on me. Don’t remember what it was called though. Or who wrote it. Or what it was about. It was stylistically daring, beautiful, and funny. Eager to read more work by that writer, I looked, but couldn’t find any. I moved three or four times, and the magazine got packed in this box or that, and almost certainly wasn’t in any of the boxes that moved with me across the country. I wish I could remember more about it, because it deserves to be read again. Around the same time, I read another cool story - this one about an artist working in new media. This was a couple decades before PC’s. The main character made or watched a film starring a number of top actors from various points in Hollywood history and had an original soundtrack by Peter Gabriel (it was a far future story). The author’s name was M.A. Foster. After getting excited about the story, I looked for the nam...

How do you find beta readers? I'm sure the answer to that is different for every writer. The one thing everyone tells me is that once you find some good dependable beta readers who give you good feedback and are happy to do it - you should do everything you can to hold onto them. How many beta readers do you need? I know people who have just two. And I know others who put it out to a large number with every book. I'm still looking, so I'm pretty sure I have more than I need for this book. But I'll winnow that down for the next one. I have a crew of friends and loved ones I go to for help and advice at different stages, but it's important to me to have beta readers who are reading the manuscript for the first time. When I ask people to beta read for me, I often have to explain the concept of “beta-reader.” Beta-Readers are essentially a hand-picked sample group. What the writer needs you to do is read it as though you just dropped the full cover price to buy i...

The longer I work on something, the more likely it is I’ll drift at some point into a creative doldrums, where I spend days or even weeks,   tweaking this, tweaking that, agonizing over a single phrase, sometimes a single word, writing in circles, rewriting the same scenes over and over and then finally just deleting them. But if I don’t lose hope, if I keep at it long enough, I generally catch a favourable wind at some point that fills my sails and carries me very quickly – sometimes almost out of control – to the end of a story or chapter. Sometimes the storm of inspiration and enthusiasm dies down suddenly, other times, it carries me right into the next chapter or next project. But one thing it almost inevitably does, is give me an unduly optimistic feeling about what I’ve just written. You’d think Shakespeare himself never penned such a masterpiece! I generally get over this quickly – usually as soon as I start to reread it. But every once in a while, the work turns...

Twitter blasts are fun. Lots of people seem to check out the threads. But I don't see them as the ultimate vehicle for communicating with readers. As I enter the home stretch and embark on my last few rounds of drafts of my diptych, my  Avenging Glory  website is moving up the priority list and I’m looking to have some fun stuff on it by Mid Summer. There's a  Web Book Marketing coach/guru named Tim Grahl  who seems to have lots on the ball. I've been shamelessly mining his free advice for the past year or so, regarding how to promote and market a book (and he has an excellent page on creating a author website). Frankly, he has a great track record with getting books in front of eyeballs, and gives really smart advice. The point I'm making by mentioning this is that the absolute core of his advice is the need to build an author platform – supported by an e-mail data-base of people. And one of the best ways to build that up is with an e-mail newsletter. I s...

Wanna See Me Turn a Book into a Diptych? Just tap the magic wand on the cover three times....and presto chango! Gahhh...I wish it were that easy! If I had realized when I decided that the opening chapters of my novel needed a little fleshing out, that I was committing myself to writing a novel length prequel that would change much of the landscape for the main novel (thereby adding the prospect of another draft to that one), I probably wouldn’t have embarked on it. After all, Avenging Glory was pretty much complete. I just intended to add a wee bit more colour, depth and detail to part one – because I was setting up one of my major characters and had just breezed through his potentially fascinating backstory with an “and then this happened” approach. And he deserved SO much more.   As I worked on it, I kept finding valid rationales for dramatizing bits of this backstory and adding new scenes and characters, and before I knew it, I’d added several chapters. And then...