A few months ago, to gear up for DMing a D&D3.5 game, I searched for digital copies of the core rulebooks. After hours futilely scanning Wizards of the Coast’s website, I determined they weren’t selling any. Oh noes! How would I find a digital copy so I don’t carry those heavy hardcopies around for all my brainstorming sessions?
I’ve stated that I write 1,000 words/day and read over 90 books/year. “Yeah, that’s great,” you say, “But you can’t possibly know that!”
Introducing: Writing and Reading Tracker
Continue reading Track Your Writing (or why a watched pot actually boils faster!)
It’s been 3 years since my last writing workshop and my ass still hurts. In a few short semesters, I’d grown embittered, defensive, and drained of creative drive. Since then, I’ve spoken to other Workshop Survivors, heard their woeful tales, and slowly internalized hard lessons about the Writing Life. I’ve heard as many people say the workshop hurt their writing as helped.
Here’s a few lessons from a Survivor on how to get all you can from your workshop:
In my previous entry, I touched incidentally on my aversion to stories set in the “real world”. I didn’t have this problem growing up — although I preferred fantasy and science fiction stories, I consumed far more contemporary realism, mystery, and suspense stories, at least in High School. Continue reading Real World Blues
During my group’s New Years’ Eve party, one of my friends since before High School and I got to discussing what we’d been watching lately.
“I’ve been enjoying Shakugan no Shana,” I said. I am, as usual, late to the scene, but to my surprise my friend, with much more free time on his hands, had just finished watching the second season, so I was only one behind. Continue reading Creator or Critic?
The stone pillars to each side of the dirt road had been overgrown with moss, and lichen covered the fenceposts. The old farmstead had fallen apart once he’d left it. The sheds where the sheep wintered lay in shambles, and the animals grazed in overgrown flowerbeds. Ol’ Mag, the cow that had been ancient before Barrett had left, gazed at his carriage as it rolled up to the entryway and bellowed before returning to her grass.
Wil huddled on his cot, peering through a crack in the wall that admitted starlight and rooftops. The straw mattress couldn’t hide the hardwood underneath from his bruises. He tried to ignore the tearing sackcloth sounds his Father’s snores made. He tried not to think about the old drunk at all.
Curling tighter to keep out the cold only drew his mind to the aches. His hands clenched around a normal looking tooth strung onto a necklace. To him, the tooth seemed to shine through his fingers, but he knew that it didn’t. Continue reading Short Story – A Jalt’s Tooth
My writing buddy read a recent story that I’m working on set in Aemon-Tor, my constructed world. I wrote that a character simultaneously saw a waxing gibbous and a waning crescent in the sky. He told me this was impossible.
Screeching halt.
Gregory Blake 