The title pretty much says it all, folks. When I’m writing, I’m constantly needing to research things: medieval clothing, swords of various eras, ships, rigging, rope names, sewer system management, tidal estuaries, mercantile societies and the role of guilds within said societies, pre-industrial food staples in different parts of the world, the burial rites of …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Everything Requires Research
Last week I talked about dissatisfaction, and in the process mentioned its big brother, doubt. Doubt manifests for writers in quite a few subtle guises, so I’m going to dedicate a column a week for a while (with potential interruptions to allow folk to recover!) looking at how doubt can sneak into a writer’s life. …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Doubts Part 1: Am I Good Enough?
Ursula K. Le Guin died this week. I read The Earthsea Trilogy (as was) a few times in my youth, and loved it. I really should get around to reading the complete Earthsea fictions, and of course many of her other works often referenced in this week of obituaries and commentaries mourning her passing. In …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Commodity Versus Art, the Eternal Challenge.
It has been over a month since The Thief and The Demon’s release. A month to reflect on how much work has been done, and realize how much more remains to be done. There is a lot to learn and to do online, social media can be an absorbing maze with a lot of new …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Maintaining Focus, New Goals
The first love you wrote, I mean. Of course, many authors successfully publish their first loves, and do astoundingly well. For others there is another story, of a first, or first and second and more novels written and discarded, before a book is released to the reading world. I’m guessing that one of those discarded …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Letting Go of Your First Love
As I’ve said in other articles, I’ve known forever that I would be a writer, and that I would write fantasy stories. Apart from one cathartic journey into writing nursing fiction, which still had elements of the fantastical (how many nurses find themselves talking to the devil and questioning their own sanity?), all of my …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Being True to Your Instincts
I tried for years to transform my writing from manuscript to novel on my own, and for years it did not work. Eventually, I recognized that I needed a team. Only through accepting this, that I was not equipped to do it alone, did I finally flourish…and I intend to do a whole lot more …
The day has finally arrived. Hard to believe after all this time that the work of writing is done, and I am a published author. My book, The Thief and The Demon, is now available for sale as an e-Book and paperback, online at Amazon.com. It still seems crazy to say that. Now that the …
I have had many plans in my writing life. Or at least I thought they were plans at the time, when in truth they were more like wish lists. Either way, the imagined path has often gone awry. This blog was originally going to be about dealing with when your writing process gets derailed, or …
Only a few days remain. Not to be dramatic or anything, but this is the culmination of a lifetime’s effort, and a childhood dream. However, the important thing is this: I believe I’ve written a book that's worth your time to read. And enjoy rereading. I really do believe this, when I swat away the …
Roderick T. Macdonald 