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LOU BEGAS MUSTACHE posted:im going to take advice from the guy who is actually accomplished itt That's the best choice. Who are the accomplished writers so I can give them money? Im out of unread books. EDIT: Not implying that I'm a professional fiction writer. Stating that people who are published/self-published/Have completed a work of fiction should totally override my opinion. SkaAndScreenplays fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 12, 2015 23:53
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crabrock posted:I'm Ska making a forums post:
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Jun 12, 2015 23:56
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SkaAndScreenplays posted:That's the best choice. I will teach you the three secret words: Buy My Book http://www.amazon.com/Traitor-Baru-Cormorant-Seth-Dickinson/dp/0765380722
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Jun 13, 2015 02:25
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General Battuta posted:I will teach you the three secret words: Buy My Book http://www.amazon.com/Traitor-Baru-Cormorant-Seth-Dickinson/dp/0765380722 that blurb is really good and makes me want to read it, but i see a dash instead of an em dash... 
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Jun 13, 2015 02:28
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I don't know who puts that stuff on Amazon or how to change it, but I am glad that's driving someone else as crazy as me. I also can't stand the comma rhythm! Fix my blurb, Tor!
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Jun 13, 2015 02:42
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General Battuta posted:I will teach you the three secret words: Buy My Book http://www.amazon.com/Traitor-Baru-Cormorant-Seth-Dickinson/dp/0765380722 I thought it was already out a while ago! Nice blurbs, man. Given Sept. 15 as the release date, how long was the period from acceptance with a publisher to release?
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Jun 13, 2015 03:14
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General Battuta posted:I don't know who puts that stuff on Amazon or how to change it, but I am glad that's driving someone else as crazy as me. I also can't stand the comma rhythm! Fix my blurb, Tor! As a publisher (lmao), it's really really easy to fix. Whoever has access to that account can change it and the change will go through in less than 24 hours. Get them to do that poo poo ASAP, like hound them to fix it for you. You care about stuff like that and your readers will too!
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Jun 13, 2015 03:17
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blue squares posted:I thought it was already out a while ago! Nice blurbs, man. Given Sept. 15 as the release date, how long was the period from acceptance with a publisher to release? About a year and a half? Fifteen months?
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Jun 13, 2015 04:22
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angel opportunity posted:that blurb is really good and makes me want to read it, but i see a dash instead of an em dash... At least...it's not an..ellipse...  General Battuta posted:I will teach you the three secret words: Buy My Book http://www.amazon.com/Traitor-Baru-Cormorant-Seth-Dickinson/dp/0765380722 SkaAndScreenplays fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 04:27
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i wonder if my debut novel is highly anticipated....
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Jun 13, 2015 05:17
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My fireplace awaits.
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Jun 13, 2015 05:25
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Hey Painted Bird, I was in a really weird place (adjusting to higher dosage and awake for 36 hours) when I wrote that post yesterday and if I came off overly harsh I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to be aggressive or anything. I stand by the feedback I provided, but don't want you to think I was attacking you or concept. I like the motley crew of characters, and the story has potential now that the core concept is clear. The "nobody cares about X" is strictly within the context of the blurb. The two followup blurbs/digital dust covers you posted were tremendous improvements. I want to know more about these characters after reading those. I like the second one better. The physical traits of the characters are still mostly unimportant. If you want to keep it streamline it a bit. "Beautiful/Bewitching" hits my brain-ear weird. Stick to one adjective maybe? The romantic allusion shifts my focus too hard. The first segment is telling me that the Twins are the POV I should be following, but then I'm hit with another double-adjective with Xomael* as the subject of the line. Also the double adjectives are both in the same vein to where one pretty much implies the other. Beautiful/Bewitching - Both imply innate/natural attractiveness Foppish/Languid - Foppish is a good word but I'd worry that it's a bit TOO strong of a word for a blurb/front page based on potential audience. I had to double-check meaning my vocabulary is well above average. Also I default to the weak/faint definition of languid. Seriously though  cause this is phenomenally better. Don't stop retooling it though. Nothing is ever as good as it can be.
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Jun 13, 2015 08:11
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It's cool, my current, stable for a month and a half dose of Concerta still makes me feral sometimes, so I know what stimulants can be like.  I appreciate the feedback!"Languid" is in there as a nod towards very old-timey queer-coding (we're talking like, Victorian era), but I might just be being an unnecessary show-off.
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Jun 13, 2015 09:00
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SkaAndScreenplays posted:Hey Painted Bird, im going to use you as a character in my highly anticipated debut novel
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Jun 13, 2015 14:33
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Just in case you aren't worried about enough things while writing: “This is a nervous letter,” wrote Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins in 1959. “I am congratulating you on the electric typewriter. It is very nice but I am not used to it yet. I keep thinking about all the electricity that is being wasted while I think what I am going to say next.” crabrock fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jun 14, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 21:55
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My standard crit group is in disarray and I've got a 10k piece I really want to sell. Anyone want to do a fast-turnaround crit (don't worry about line edits much) for me? Looking for 'this doesn't make any sense,' 'this came out of nowhere,' and 'I have lost my connection to the characters in all this esoteric bullshit.' It's military space opera about a young ace who's in love with her captain, terrified of her own knack for violence, and haunted by crazy-rear end dreams. and it's thinly veiled FreeSpace 2 Morrigan in Shadow posted:She’s falling into the singularity. sethjosephdickinson at gmail General Battuta fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jun 15, 2015 |
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Jun 15, 2015 02:07
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Speaking of highly-anticipated debut novels, I'm going to be done with my novel's rewrite in a little over a month or so. What are some good craft books about novel editing? As in, how to approach reading it for the first time, messing with big picture stuff, and then finally dialing it all in.
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Jun 15, 2015 03:12
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Forgive me if this has been discussed recently but I'm new to CC. I just began to work on a novella that I've been thinking about for a long time, but while I have a good idea of how I want to write the meatier chapters I'm having a lot of trouble getting through the more subtle, less exciting parts. I'm thinking about working on the significant material first until I'm more in the mood for the other stuff. Does anyone have advice for this situation? I'm new to serious writing so I'm not sure how I should approach the process: just write from start to finish, or different pieces at a time? I only have a rough outline in my head. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Jun 15, 2015 06:25
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MantisToboggan posted:just write from start to finish, or different pieces at a time? I only have a rough outline in my head. Write the scenes you're motivated to write. But it may be a good idea to actually write your outline down, too, so that between now and getting to those scenes you're less than ready for, you won't forget the beats you intended to hit. It's also worthwhile to sit down and think about why you're not as excited about some scenes.
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Jun 15, 2015 13:14
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I'm writing really dumb porn now instead of good stuff, but I'm learning a very valuable lesson from writing 3-5k words per day seven days per week. Just loving write and finish a story, even if it's a novella or novel. Even if you work full-time you can write 3,000 words per day. It's A LOT of work, but anyone can do it provided you don't have kids or other big responsibilities after work. If your target length is 50k words for a novella, then you should be able to finish it in just over two weeks. How does that sound compared to feeling guilty about writing it for like four months? Just knock it out and get it done. If you DON'T even have a job, treat writing the novel as your job. Wake up in the morning and work until lunch, take a nice break, then work until early evening or until your brain gets fried. How sad is it if you don't have a job, like writing and want to do a novel, and yet you write less than 1,000 words per day? No one ever wants to hear this, but the first one or two, or three or four novel(las) that you write are probably going to be poo poo. You have to finish them to get good at writing what you want to write. You can't get good at writing novels by writing 500 words every other day. Don't do that thing where you tell yourself that the thing you are writing right now is your great big idea, and that when you finish it--some day--it will be really good. Finish it in a month or less (and don't try to write an 800-page epic fantasy/space opera as your first novel) and then start another one.
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Jun 15, 2015 13:23
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Yeah, I'm actually learning the valuable lesson of forcing myself through a scene I don't want to write, just to get the words down on the digital paper. Then surprise surprise, the next day I'm much happier, it didn't turn out that bad, and I'm free to move on to something more exciting. Been forcing myself to write about 2k words a day, though if I'm on a roll I will keep going and sometimes do 3-3.5k.
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Jun 15, 2015 16:18
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Consistency has been the most important thing in my experience. If you write 3000 words on Monday and then another 3000 on Friday with nothing in between, you don't actually gain a whole lot. Conversely, a mere 1000 words every day for a month will actually help you a ton. Plus, as you get used to writing 1000 a day, you'll reach a point where you're like "poo poo, why not go for 1500?" and then "why not go for 2000?" You can't go for the marathon right away and expect not to get burned out; you have to build up to it.
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Jun 15, 2015 17:59
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To add to systran's post If you have a job, treat your writing like night school homework. You HAVE to finish it before you get to play vidgames or watch TV or whatever non-writing fun stuff you do when you're not at work. Otherwise, if you're like me, you'll go "yeah I'll do some writing AFTER I play an hour or two of XCOM: Enemy Within" and then five hours later it's time to go to bed. And if you're married, get your spouse onboard with some kind of daily writing quota so she/he/it won't be dominating your writing time completely.
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Jun 15, 2015 19:06
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crabrock posted:Yeah, I'm actually learning the valuable lesson of forcing myself through a scene I don't want to write, just to get the words down on the digital paper. Then surprise surprise, the next day I'm much happier, it didn't turn out that bad, and I'm free to move on to something more exciting.
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Jun 15, 2015 19:26
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I just lost about eighty pages of material due to a mixture of fat-finger stupidity and a lovely laptop. Should I go back and try to replace them with what I remember and think of it as an editing experience, or should I work on something else in the meantime until the irritation dies away?
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Jun 15, 2015 19:58
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Screaming Idiot posted:I just lost about eighty pages of material due to a mixture of fat-finger stupidity and a lovely laptop. Should I go back and try to replace them with what I remember and think of it as an editing experience, or should I work on something else in the meantime until the irritation dies away? If it were me, I'd probably spend an hour or so figuring out if it was possible to retrieve at all. I'd be real mad, but gain an important lesson about backing up data. If I couldn't get it back, I'd give up in a huff and just accept my lot. Then I'd start writing it again a few hours later when I felt like a lousy quitter. From now on I recommend that you write in the smallest font possible so that if it happens again, you only lost 10 pages instead of 80, no biggie.
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Jun 15, 2015 20:15
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google drive is a writer's friend.
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Jun 15, 2015 20:16
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On the write regularly thing. I started out forcing myself to write 2k words a day at the beginning of May. By the start of June I was hitting 2k every day, and 3k most days. By the beginning of last week I was writing 3.5k every day until the weekend. Since Friday night I've written 5k every day, including today and it's 8pm and I'm going to visit friends. I might write more when I'm home.
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Jun 15, 2015 20:20
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I'm pretty sure the answer is "Just write," but are there any specific drills/practices that help you guys work on making character voices sound distinct and easily distinguishable? I find that my dialogue is all super-generic, or heavily accented/specialized to the point of absurdity.
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Jun 17, 2015 21:57
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Find a book that you think is good at distinct character voices, pick a chapter or two, make a column for each character and write down each line of dialogue the character has in that section. Look at the result while rubbing your chin thoughtfully.
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Jun 17, 2015 22:16
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Omi no Kami posted:I'm pretty sure the answer is "Just write," but are there any specific drills/practices that help you guys work on making character voices sound distinct and easily distinguishable? I find that my dialogue is all super-generic, or heavily accented/specialized to the point of absurdity. A quick and dirty method (stolen from GMing roleplaying games) is to assign characters from films to your characters. So like that bartender is Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs, and the barmaid is, poo poo, I dunno, Rainbow Dash from my little pony or w/e. Doesn't actually matter who you pick but it will differentiate them and give you a spine to hang character development on and it will be entirely impossible to pick the antecedents since no one knows who you're seeing in your head when you write.
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Jun 17, 2015 22:29
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Listening to actual people talk can be helpful too, though obviously don't be creepy about it. There are still some tricks to it - a lot of people try to replicate authentic dialogue too closely, and end up with something that is a chore to read (filled with uhms and ahs, pauses, likes, etc.) Which is not to say you can't include those, you just have to develop an ear for it. One piece of advice that always stuck with me (I think it might have even been from this thread, a long time ago) is that people rarely talk directly to each other. Often you will realize that people are talking past each other, or have some motive behind what they are saying. Outside of small talk (which is as boring in fiction as it is in real life), there is generally a reason behind everything a person says, and those reasons can be pretty complex. Great dialogue works by condensing those complex moods / emotions into a spoken line without turning it into exposition.
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Jun 17, 2015 23:24
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That's really helpful, thanks guys!  On the topic of examining how other authors have effectively done it, I have lots of structural issues with the Harry Potter books but I really respect the dialogue minimalism in the early ones- she and/or her editors did an excellent job of ensuring that every single character moment was building towards something.
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Jun 17, 2015 23:30
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Omi no Kami posted:That's really helpful, thanks guys! It really helps when you're staring at a piece of dialog wondering how to fix it.
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Jun 18, 2015 01:33
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Omi no Kami posted:I'm pretty sure the answer is "Just write," but are there any specific drills/practices that help you guys work on making character voices sound distinct and easily distinguishable? I find that my dialogue is all super-generic, or heavily accented/specialized to the point of absurdity. For your purposes (it's for the detective game, right?) find a writer.
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Jun 18, 2015 02:19
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Omi no Kami posted:I'm pretty sure the answer is "Just write," but are there any specific drills/practices that help you guys work on making character voices sound distinct and easily distinguishable? I find that my dialogue is all super-generic, or heavily accented/specialized to the point of absurdity. Read screenplays of movies with dialogue you like...and watch good television. TV/Film is all about dialogue. EDIT: Adding Suggestions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuyjhM1vL9I <-Star Trek Next Generation has some great dialogues. Picard/Q is always a great dynamic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTB4NjBzK8c <-Deep Space 9 is full of fantastic "Human" interactions. Anything with Quark is sure to be solid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gquLZJpt-Q <-Far and Away the best dialogue in Game of Thrones this season. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tZTNMQdb68 <-Burn Notice's dialogue is great, and the show is also useful for practical knowledge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5znTCoKLPI <-Tom Waits' delivery can teach you a lot about pacing dialogue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuzBLu_IZCw <-Scrubs has great timing/pacing with the comedic parts and the serious parts. EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kfLdwL1t98 <-Seriously though. Watch Scrubs/Read Scrubs scripts. Take into account what is happening around your dialogue. Look at how in a screen/tele/stage play they introduce action to dialogue. Consider the context and tone of the dialogue and make your character's actions/body language reflect those stimuli. If you're looking for a good source of shooting scripts The Script Lab Let's You Download Them For Free SkaAndScreenplays fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 03:50
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Megazver posted:For your purposes (it's for the detective game, right?) find a writer. This is actually more writing short stories for fun- weirdly enough, I find it way easier to write for games than I do to write in a purely prosaic setting. Edit: Thank you for the recommendations! Studying is fun when it involves spies and spaceships. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 04:38
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Omi no Kami posted:This is actually more writing short stories for fun- weirdly enough, I find it way easier to write for games than I do to write in a purely prosaic setting. 9/10 times I don't like the dialogue in prose it's because the exposition gets thrown out of the window and a meaningful conversation just becomes  I'd much rather read about 2 characters interacting with one another than just talking to each other (if that makes sense). There are plenty of exceptions, but when I see. quote:"Herp derp deflurgigoop." Said The Dude And it goes on for a significant portion of the scene I lose immersion. Go out and have real conversations...watch people at parties. You're trying to emulate real human interactions, people react to the things that are said to them. Also read Dune...The dialogue in Dune is exceptionally tight. SkaAndScreenplays fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 06:53
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I have the same dislike as a reader, but I find that I compensate way too far in the other direction, and end up with loads of scenarios where minimal dialogue would've been preferable to pages of purple prose following each statement.
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Jun 18, 2015 07:13
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watch Buffy for a good example of dialogue.
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Jun 18, 2015 07:17
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