Maybe I'm just arrogant and handsome, but I don't think my first draft is shitty. My first draft is awesome, and I bet yours is too, which is why I'm really starting to hate how often your first draft will be shitty is being thrown around as an accepted maxim or worse, as a piece of writing advice. I understand how we got here--if you put a first draft and a final product side-by-side, you'll...
NaNoWriMo is coming up soon, which means a new crop of writers will be looking for the right software to help write their 50,000-word opus. Enter Novlr, a web-based writing platform that is simple, clean, and eager to motivate you to reach your goal. If you're doing NaNoWriMo for the first time, Novlr is a great choice. But what about the rest of us? What about the seasoned amateurs who haven't...
I published Xronixle in 2007, and I still get questions about how to pronounce the title and what the hell it means. This has led me to take greater care in the selection of titles, especially when it came to Por Vida, which had *GASP* Spanish words. Today's 3F3 is the brainstorming session I had in hopes of picking a more accessible title. I remember...
If the Sally-Anne experiment teaches us one thing, it’s that we should consider the psychology of our readers when we’re putting a story together.
I don't read comics, but I like making them. That is, I like making them when they're not too much work, and no site made it easier than bitstrips.com. I loved that site. Now it's gone and I'm sad. But I still have some comics I made about the two things I love most: writing and m'pups. If anyone knows of a replacement, please let me know.
The introduction to Tropic of Cancer was written by Karl Shapiro, an American poet who died in 2000. At first, I misread and thought the Intro was written by Anais Nin, which is the only reason I read it in the first place. I'd read her work, so I was curious to hear what she thought of Miller. Two pages into the Intro, I sank into a deep depression.
Por Vida is a novel about synthetic transcendence, obsession, friendship, mental health, y más y más, but I struggled for a long time to write it. Initially, it was just a guy and a girl in a bunker at the end of the world. Just that idea alone makes me think oh that's neat, but how do we change that to oh that's compelling?