Not the catchiest title, I admit. But I’m here to share how a royal screw up of mine added a gloriously horrific typo to my book AFTER it had been laboriously proofread and judged error free. And I did it as part of the process, not on a whim. Well, okay, there were whims involved, …
Continue reading What happens when you deviate from the process: Collector’s edition edition.
This is an update. After losing/significantly depleting my GAF as previously described, I decided to do my usual (i.e. done once before) final step of reading my book out loud to myself as a way to interrogate each sentence and catch egregious typos. This is now done. Yay. I fixed some sentences here and there, …
Continue reading The Writing Life: The Power of the Spoken Word
Another rapid freehand blog today. Which means five plus edits after publication - my apologies to those of you who get version one mailed to you! My face is hot. I think because I've been talking for hours. To myself. I've been reading The Killer and The Dead aloud, and I'm here to say (thankfully …
Sometimes in the grind of writing, editing, marketing, and then selling your work it is easy to get lost. You forget the vibrancy of first ideas, the thrill of plot creation, the joy of characters growing beyond their first sketches and pushing against the boundaries of their originally envisaged roles. The slog of to do …
It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to crank out a blog of an evening. I completed the line edit in double time, missing deadline by a day, but I’ll take it, and my editor is a forgiving soul, for which I am grateful. The essential truth of why I write fantasy – …
So I received my developmental notes for The Killer and The Dead last week. These notes were a collection of thoughtful comments and suggestions on plot, structure, pacing, writing, setting, and character. Plus a ton of in-text comments on specific aspects of the book, good and bad, pointing out places where improvements could be made, …
Ah, my writing holiday is almost over, as I get the developmental edits on The Killer and The Dead back tomorrow. I have one more night of imagining I’ll get a note of stunned awe, and thanks for writing such a thing of searing beauty. And writers out there, you do hope for that kind …
In creative life, many do not appreciate the time taken between the hammer and the fall. Now I’m going to be all metal and talk about hammers and striking and forging, but the metaphor could just as easily be the time taken between the seed and the flower, and be about soil and water and …
So I had this plan (not for a giant wooden badger) to start writing the first draft of my next book while The Killer and The Dead is off getting developmentally edited. You know, use the time, maximize my word counts, get the first few chapters of The Slavegirl and the Traveller banged out and …
So folks, while it is fresh in my mind I thought I’d reiterate what I thought was one of the central points discussed during our panel at Denver Comic Con. (Thank you once again to my fab panelists!) And that is this: I feel that paying attention to the culture a character grows up in, …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: Morality, Culture, and Character Creation
Roderick T. Macdonald 