My wife and I have been playing catch-up on Dancing With The Stars for the last two weeks. ABC makes all its prime-time shows available for free on their website the day after they air, so we rolled-back to the beginning of the season, cuddled up on the couch and queued it up.

I am not [...]

I’ve recently joined a writing site: The Next Big Writer. It’s devoted to writers submitting work-in-progress and exchanging reviews with an eye toward improvement. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for since I completed June Betrayals and I joined with high hopes. I haven’t had other writers critiquing my work in a long time and [...]

What’s wrong with this scene?

Sheryl tossed her rich, luxurious mane of raven-black hair over her shoulder, the late-afternoon sunlight filling it with highlights. “Kiss me,” she said.

Rico took a long, leisurely sip of his Sumatran double-expresso, the half-and-half and two packets of raw cane sugar helping it slide down his throat like liquid gold. He [...]

First you create your protagonist, then you create an antagonist to prevent them from getting what they want. That’s one of the basic tools of character-oriented writing lessons. This makes it easy to write lessons, but hard to write really good fiction, because your protagonist’s most constant enemy is him/herself.

This is particularly true of continuing [...]

Everybody seems to be talking about marketing these days. As a programmer, we always took Dilbert’s “Welcome to Marketing: Two Drink Minimum” attitude about marketers as a breed, but I’ve run across at least two gurus of the art that make it seem not only credible as vocation, but interesting, entertaining and potentially profitable. Seth [...]

In any long-term endeavor, there are going to be times when you don’t feel like doing your work. Days when you just can’t face the keyboard, canvas, whatever. During these periods it’s very easy to hate what you’re doing or wonder if it’s worth doing at all.

An important thing to note is that once you’re [...]

Everybody argues about whether it’s plot or character that’s the source of good fiction. Of course, it’s a trick question: the real answer is that there is no real plot that doesn’t derive from character and no way to show character except by their reactions to plot. But I’m starting to think both of these [...]