So I finished all the primary adjustments to The Killer and The Dead today. Then I accepted all on every other change in the document made by my editor. (I have read them all in passing, but not focused on them as it is just too deep a rabbithole for me to fall down.) I'm …
Tag: writing
The Writing Life: Trust Your Editor and Yourself When Dusting Glass Tables
Hello, and Happy New Year, folks! (I'll do a New Year's thought another day.) The copy edit of The Killer and The Dead continues in my basement of dust and glass tables. It ain’t for sissies. But the book is awesome, if I say so myself. I have continued to do 10, or 20, or …
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The Writing Life: Thinking about Analogy
Today, when not drowning in work, I was thinking about analogies and metaphors and dusty tables. That is all. I also decided that I would set myself a small goal, and if I met it, I’d write a blog saying I had met a small goal. Because that is the kind of thrilling hi-jinks people …
The Writing Life: The Dusty Road to Copy Edit Completion
I’ve been gone a while. In this period of absence I’d like to say I’ve been finishing off the edits to The Killer and The Dead. Nope. I’ve been working, dieting (dieting takes a whole lot of my mental energy, it turns out – I really have to focus on not eating, hahaha!), and doing …
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Why I Write Fantasy: To go to a School and try to Explain Why I Write Fantasy
I would like to thank Steven Craig and Parker Performing Arts School for inviting myself and the ever excellent Cheryl Carpinello in for a sequence of Q&A sessions with four classes of engaged and enthusiastic pupils today. I really enjoyed meeting the students and burbling on at length about many aspects of writing and fantasy …
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The Writing Life: Patience
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 …
Why I Write Fantasy: Hamster Wheel Edition
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 – …
The Writing Life: Work and Writing Part 1: The Overview
I’ve been meaning to write about the struggles of managing work and writing for a long time. I’ve written, or tried to write in a lot of different circumstances, and it is hard to say which, if any, has been the best option. Obsessive teen living on a farm with not much else to do? …
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The Writing Life: The Long Road of Line Editing
What is line editing? Well, if developmental edits are big picture issues looking at story, plot, character and setting among other things, and copy editing is getting down to the nuts and bolts of grammar, then line editing exists somewhere in between. Line editing is taking your manuscript to a spa: to sweat off the …
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One Year On
So in fairy tales it is often a year and a day that people must wait, or that passes before the next significant event in the story. It has been a year and three days since I officially released my first book. Doesn’t seem that long. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all …
Roderick T. Macdonald 