I’m sure there are plenty of books about it and several AIs are standing by ready to answer the question, but that’s not helpful for internalizing it. Somewhere in all these writing posts, I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I realized something years ago: All my favorite TV shows are layered. There’s a showContinue reading “What is Plot?”
Tag Archives: reading
Balance of Power
LitRPG universes generally survive due to Mutually Assured Destruction. When you’ve got people – and “not that many” is literally billions in a multiverse of any size – who can sterilize planets and blow up stars, something needs to keep them in check. The answer is usually “a coalition will gang up on you andContinue reading “Balance of Power”
Publishing Schedule
Chapters 16 and 17 are “done”. 18, 19, 20 are half-ish. The rest are a paragraph, at most. However, fighting with fonts made me wonder: When could I get this published? My plan is to have the first and second ready-to-upload done before pressing the button on #1. The third will be written before theContinue reading “Publishing Schedule”
Hardcopy!
First the good news: I “finished” to the logical/plot halfway point. I put it all together. I used the “master document” thing so it’s not copy/paste. 15 chapters. 67K words. 162 pages. That is indeed half a novel. Huzzah! The bad news: I suck. There is markup on almost every other page. At least forContinue reading “Hardcopy!”
The Hobgoblin of Consistency
That’s the last one. I think it’s a contender. Illustrate pulls at me. The chapters are getting longer. I tried to fight this, but I’m giving up. It’s too early to worry about it and constantly renumbering things is getting expensive. I’m writing as a file per chapter, so renumbering changes all the filenames. InContinue reading “The Hobgoblin of Consistency”
Learning 2 Write – XIII
Explicit Time I’ve already decided that chapters are going to be my unit of story/plot/logical time. My goal is to have each chapter be approximately the same page count, which is right now about six 8.5×11 pages, and cover approximately the same amount of story/plot, which is right now about one level. It’s nothing asContinue reading “Learning 2 Write – XIII”
Learning 2 Write – XI
Titles It occurs to me that I need both series and book titles. I have only one criterion: Book Title + Series Title + book number MUST be readable. Browsing through my Kindle for examples… Jack of All: LitRPG, Isekai, Survival Adventure (Book 1) fails in two ways. If one is looking at multiple books,Continue reading “Learning 2 Write – XI”
Learning 2 Write – X
Endings I just finished Ithria Book 15. It ended as I feared: Cliff-hanger. Sort-of. There’s enough said that there is no doubt whatsoever about what will happen (the bad guys are going to get their ass severely kicked), but the actual happening will be in book 16. This is more a case of “the lastContinue reading “Learning 2 Write – X”
Learning 2 Write
Continuous Chapter Numbers I found one: The Matter Destructor. I just downloaded books three and four. I’ve read book three, but I don’t remember any details, so I wanted to re-read it before reading book four. The book opened on Chapter 62. It’s nice that Amazon remembers my place – especially when it doesn’t tellContinue reading “Learning 2 Write”
Learning 2 Write – V
Time This may be the hardest part about writing a novel – other than actually typing it out. Authors get this wrong a LOT. Time in novels must be “stretchy” simply due to the medium. As a counter example, movie scenes must run in real-time because we’re watching people do things – including talk toContinue reading “Learning 2 Write – V”
Marked Up 