Maps

If you have fun with worldbuilding in your stories, maps are great. When you’re stuck for ideas, often starting from the landscape up can help.

Also, shifting your brain into a different area of creativity (drawing instead of writing) can loosen up the ideas. So draw a hand-made map!

If nothing else, it can help you keep track of which direction your characters are going and what they’re going to encounter next. It can help you keep your mind on terrain and environment, remind you to do good descriptions.

And most of all, it’s fun!

Fun With Critique Groups

It’s nice! I’ve got 4 or 5 new people in my critique group, pretty much doubling the numbers. Of course, more than 20 people responded to the invitation, and only 5 signed up; about what I’d expect. It’s interesting how that works, isn’t it? I wonder if those numbers are typical across the board for anything people show interest in and then sign up for and then have to actually show up.

In any case, this is a good writer’s group for me because, for once, I’m not the best writer there, so there is some actually useful criticism and learning to be had. Now, this is not self-praise, I just haven’t been able to find good groups in my life–not that many writers where I’ve been. Anyhow, it’s a good thing!

The Magic Mirror

Find who bothers you the most–makes you feel the worst. What traits do they have that bug you, or what do they do that really upsets you? Examples?

Okay, now turn each statement around. Is it real–are you SURE it’s real? Can you turn it around so it applies to you, and find more examples?

Now the real trick… can you let it go?

The Open Secret

I don’t mention it on my other site, because this is the one for naughty stuff, but I use another name for non-naughty fiction. Any news on Disform is over there, as it will be sent around under the other name. Likewise, any non-romance, non-naughty work is over there. Worth a look? You decide.

Kathleen Dale, Fiction Author

Keep Walking

Moving forward. It’s just one word in front of the other.

The hard part is not stopping. It’s no surprise that ‘journal’ and ‘journey’ have the same root. It’s really all about continuing… skill and ability and persistence and self-confidence, all those things you need to get and stay published, are emergent properties of continuing.

Keep writing.

Too many projects

Working on the edits for one novel… trying to write three others… attempting to compose a short story or two… do the serial as it goes along… plus lots of real life stuff. Looking forward to a move. Trying to get a job to pay for same. A whole new approach to parenting. Dealing with serious teenager issues.

It’s kind of too much.

But I’m still trying. It would help if I had more of a support system. My three dear friends do their best, but there’s only so much they can do.

I do have a sense of proportion about it all… I mean, I’m not dealing with alcoholics, drug addicts, car crashes, cancer, psychotic relatives, wartime rationing or the Black Plague.

Yet.

But I suspect, real life aside, it would probably help if I’d pick one project to work on, and do that. What do you think?

Free Read of the Month

I forgot to mention that it was posted! It’s going to be a serial, written as I go. That means you are essentially reading the first draft, and I don’t know where it’s going to go, and who knows if it will ever be finished? So here’s a chance to see the process as it happens.

Thanks for reading!

Two Things…

There are two things you need to do FIRST.

Before you worry about how good you are, what genre you’re in, how marketable your work is, how to improve it, or whether it’s too derivative. While you’re still writing fan fiction. Before you get out of being too shy to show it. Before you take a single class, read a single how-to book, make a single revision note, before you even check your spelling.

Before you call yourself a writer at all, even within your secret heart.

First, be a reader. For pleasure, in your own time, for the joy of it.

Second, write things that you finish. FINISH. Short, long or otherwise, bring your stories to a conclusion at least three times (to show you consistently can) before you take any other steps along this career path.

If you do those two things, you are already halfway there. Already head and shoulders over most people who call themselves writers.

If you don’t do those two things, you aren’t anywhere.

Happy April Fool’s Day!

Let’s keep it… relatively harmless, okay?

The Way

There is a purity to having no choices, and a purity to having all choices, and in a strange way they are the same thing. If no one is making you do anything, pushing you in any specific direction, then there is no one to blame, no excuse that it wasn’t your fault, no way to do anything but face yourself and your options.

If it is all surrender, there’s nothing to fight against.

There’s something here I’m trying to say, but… it’s the result of long processes, and the ideas closest to my heart, and I don’t know how to explain without taking you through the entire process.