Good morning! I hope you are doing well. As I’m sitting here, typing this out, snow is gently falling to the ground, moving not unlike stuffing pulled out of a pillow and thrown into the air; my wife is sitting on the coffee table in the living room, reading to our little one while she twirls her hair and sucks her thumb; and I don’t know what to put as the third thing to complete this trio, but I just generally feel good. The clacking of keys typing could be an option, but also doesn’t feel particularly poetic since, for me, laptop keys are tools to create art, not objects of art in themselves.

Whether or not a tool can be art itself is a major debate in the conlang community, but that’s probably too much of a tangent…

Anyway, The Nerdy Narrative game me a shoutout on X/Twitter! Lezlie, I really appreciated that, and I hope you enjoy the audiobook. I narrated it myself—and as someone who pursued voice acting for a while but never went anywhere with it, I think I did a really good job for a first outing. I have had to fix a few issues in the audio here and there, so don’t be afraid to let me know if something needs repairs!

Finally (for this section, anyway), The Failed Technomancer, chapter 17, is live! Hannah needs to figure out what Id’s plans are with Cortex, but with Id able to control Hannah’s mind, that might be a little difficult… At the same time, 64Bit and Kayla are finally reaching the ruins of Fort, each with different plans in mind. What might they find in the rubble of their once-home?…

Discussions—Dragonsteel MiniCon 2023

This week’s panel (that I’m reviewing notes from) is Writing Romantsy. Now, I did not attend this panel with any interest in writing romance-fantasy—nor with any real interest in the genre—but I think being widely learned (while trying to be deeply learned in specific areas) is important. And, since I think of writing romantic B or C plots sometimes, this information will probably prove useful at some point anyway. And there were a few gems I gleaned.

Here’s the first big one: “A good romance has character conflict at its heart. If there is no character conflict, there is no story—at least, no romance in the story.” In short, if your character meet up and just fall into love without fighting a bit first, that’s not really romance. Or, at least, it’s not the kind of story readers are looking for when they want romance. (I’ve been told once that the “buddy cop” formula is basically the same thing as a romance formula, with the initial meeting, the “rocks-in-a-tumbler” experiences, and the eventual make-up that turns into love for a romance and good friends, or solid partners, for the cops. That was not part of this panel.)

While The Precious Burden of Joy is not a romance, but it does lean buddy cop, so I need to keep this lesson clearly in mind. I’m naturally inclined toward action and set pieces when I write: thinking of scenes of meaningful character conflict takes a little more effort.

And here’s the second big one, which is actually a pretty universal lesson: readers search for books nowadays by trope and keyword, not so much by genre. This matters a lot when crafting your blurb and when collecting metadata for your book while putting it on the web, not so much for the writing process (unless you’re the kind of writer to look at tropes and keywords that are growing in popularity and then choose to write toward those).

Granted, this lesson came from romantsy writers, a genre where I think trope draw is a little more powerful than other genres—but I’m also far from an expert in the mainstream or the silent majority. I just know the circles I inhabit in this internet, and there the readers I meet tend to be happy when handed a sci-fi or fantasy book, or if they aren’t ecstatic it’s simply because they might want a genre that’s a little more specific than what they were handed—cyberpunk instead of general sci-fi, for example. (Or stonepunk, I learned recently that’s a thing.) It’s not necessarily the very specific, narrow tropes they are reading for.

Writing Updates

The Precious Burden of Joy is just cruising along this week. My restart did wonders for my productivity—now that I know my characters better, it’s a lot easier to discovery write my way toward my plot goals, learning the best paths to take as I go. My current word count is almost 13,000 words.

One of my writing group members asked this question in our Discord, and it made me think a bit about my story:

So… how do you guys keep focus on character if you have plot points planned? Just throw out the plan and run with the characters?

Bob, the totally legit name for this guy, yep.

I am what I describe as a goal-oriented discovery writer. I don’t start writing a story until I know how I want it to end, and I don’t start writing until I at least have an idea of the characters I want to start with and how I want the protagonist(s) to change. Once I have those resources, I follow the characters and write toward the goals I have set, discovering along the way the best path. This often results in a lot of revision after finishing the first draft, but I think that’s a good thing—thank goodness rough drafts can be rough!

Anyway, that’s basically it on the writing front for me. The Courage in a Small Heart is waiting for a judge to read it at Writers of the Future (which I don’t think will happen earlier than February or March of next year, if I understand their schedule at all), Inner Demon is sitting in the slush pile at Baen Publishing (with a similar schedule, to my understanding), and that’s about it so far.

Send-Off

When has branching outside of your comfort zone/preferences benefited you in an unexpected way?