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I recently looked back at early drafts of HOST for fun and to see my progress as a writer. One thing that stood out to me was my settings and descriptions of various elements. They were…terrible? Non-existent? Not important? All of the above. It took a few drafts for me Read more
Is there a difference? Spoilers: yes, there is. To put it simply, plot is the events that occur, where story is the change that occurs with the characters. Their arc, lesson learned, or heart of the story as a whole. Took me a bit to really figure this one out. Read more
My first novel, HOST, is done. Of course, I still have pre-publishing steps to do, marketing, and promotion to work through, but the book, the story itself, is done. It starts, middles, and ends. It’s been through multiple beta readers, professional editors, proofreader, it’s done. Right? Yes, it’s done. I’m Read more
One of the many lessons I learned while writing my first novel, HOST, is put the effort up front into your characters motivations and goals. If you can distill them down to a single sentence, hell a single word, it’ll pay dividends as these characters move through the plot and Read more
It took me a bit to figure out exactly what genre my book would land in. At first, I thought it’d be sci-fi, it had elements of science fiction so that’s it, right? Then I leaned into the sub-genre of technothriller. Heavy on the tech details and encapsulates sci-fi enough Read more
POV – what a chaotic mess it can be. My first draft of HOST was in first-person. It was terrible. I had no clue what I was doing. I understood what POV was but in practice I clearly had no idea or how to use it correctly, if at all. Read more
Having gone through the entire editing process from development to copy to proofread with my novel, it seemed like a no-brainer topic for Writer Syndrome to chat about. My writing pal, buddy, friend, amigo, Tim Letteney and I sat down and chatted through the entire process during this episode. What Read more