Happy New Year to the few, the strong, the loyal who are still here at Dreamwidth.

2016, like 2015, has been about my homemade MFA program in creative writing. My "thesis"--which was due on December 31st and should be done this week--is a publishable final draft of Restraint. I expect 2017 to be about writing, too ( Read more... )

Even though I don't come here very often anymore, and I don't know why that is*, I just renewed my paid account. I also don't know why that is ( Read more... )

When you turn 60, joke-getting-old cards actually become funny. Who knew?

This one was from my little sister, who's only 58.


( Read more... )

I turned 60 in December.

( Let me tell you a little about why life is good. )

The biggest difference, I'm finding, between a novel-length fanfic and a publishable novel isn't that you have to change the characters' names and give them different haircolors (though there is that).

The biggest difference is that you're writing for strangers.

( Telling the story to strangers )

Robert McKee: Story: Style, Structure, Substance...
Christopher Vogler: The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
Shawn Coyne: The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know
John Yorke: Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story
Larry Brooks: Story Physics and Story Engineering and Story Fix Larry Brooks ( Read more... )

The second meeting of the Super Hardcore Editing Group left me a bit wrung out. The work is intense and so are the people doing it. A lot of brainpower goes into those two hours--so much brainpower, in fact, that I was worthless for anything except Twitter and grocery shopping until six hours had gone by ( Read more... )

Now playing in my Audible library: Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.

Liz (I call her Liz) says a whole bunch of the things Steven Pressfield said in his wonderful The War of Art, but I vastly prefer the way she says them. Pressfield uses a lot of sports and war metaphors that don't resonate much with me. Liz, as you ( Read more... )

In my quest to level up in my writing, I set out blindly last summer to revise my novel.

My friend Sue lobbed inspiration at me in the form of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and I began to see myself as a Warrior for Art. It was a thrilling time, overcoming Resistance, writing every day for four hours, and going outdoors in the early ( Read more... )

Brilliant critique group today! Everyone's submissions showed evidence of real story-structuring and genuine improvement.

The ladies all approved of my heavily revised Restraint Chapter 1, and while that was nice, what I really loved was that we all knew why it was better. Not just, Wow I like this, but Wow, this really moves, it has an arc, I ( Read more... )