Good afternoon! Or, at least, the weekend version of me predicts that this will be sent out in the afternoon on Monday. If I’m right, that greeting will make sense. If I’m wrong, I declare myself still better able to predict the future than Madame Web.

My best, most productive writing time is in the morning, and spending that time—on Monday, the first day of the week, often setting the tone for the rest of the week—not working on my novel feels wrong. As such, I’m going to experiment with changing when I most regularly publish these blog posts.

Chapter 28 of The Failed Technomancer is live! Dig a little deeper into Zed’s head… if you dare!

There are a few links in this post—none are affiliated links. I just like links. That way if someone wants to look up something I mention, I save them a few seconds of time by letting them click on something right there.

Bloggyness Review—Life, the Universe, and Everything

Forty-two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything—unfortunately that answer, without the question, is largely meaningless to us.

Thank you, Douglas Adams, for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But that’s not actually what I’m talking about today. By Life, the Universe, and Everything, I’m referring to the writer’s conference held in Provo, Utah.

I was blown away by the experience at LTUE and fully intend to return every year. I think I learned more about the craft of writing and the business of being an author at LTUE this year than in all of my years of college, at least as far as pure knowledge and actionable advice is concerned. Add to that the extremely good pricing, particularly considering that parking was covered at no extra charge, and lots of interactions with wonderful, experienced professionals…

Every conference I go to after this has a high bar set. (I will add the caveat that this is the first professional writing conference that I’ve been to.)

That said, if you’re not a writer, or if you are not in a writing-and-publishing-adjacent field (like narrating audiobooks, doing cover or interior art for novels, etc), you probably won’t get much out of this conference. Probably. I didn’t go to any of the sillier panels, so I could be wrong about the opportunities for simple nerding and geeking out. But the vast majority of the panels did not exist solely for the sake of silliness.

Anyway, here are some highlights that you may find interesting.

—Recommended Reading Material:

On Prose: Dreyer’s English (Dreyer); How to Write Stunning Sentences (Nina Schuler); The 10% Solution; Stein on Writing (Sol Stein); Chicago Style for Fiction; How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One (Stanley Fish)

On Story: Save the Cat (Rob Snyder); Story Genius (Lisa Cron); The Emotional Craft of Fiction (Donald Maas); Romancing the Beat (Gwen Hays)

Other: The Freelance Editor’s Handbook

I collected these over the course of many panels over all three days.

—Most Quoted Professional Author (at the panels I went to): Neil Gaiman.

And here’s the specific quote that was repeated most often:

Remember that when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Neil Gaiman

—Most Repeated Advice: FINISH. Stop revising your manuscript if you haven’t finished it yet. Just sit down and write. FINISH.

—Panels that Hit Me the Hardest: This ended up being a tie between two panels, one on Heinlein’s Five Rules of Writing and one called “Writing your Characters from the Soul Up” by an author named Colby Dunn.

The Five Rules panel mostly can be boiled down to the most-repeated advice of the conference: FINISH. (Also, once you are finished, go “put your book to market [and leave it there].”) But that still really struck me. I do spend too much time making revisions before my first draft is completed, revisions that may be rendered moot by how I manage to implement the ending I planned out. At the bare minimum, finishing before revising is a more efficient process.

Colby’s panel excited me because I think it hit on things I’ve been trying to figure out with character creation (and development) but couldn’t put the words to. It immediately inspired me with ways that I could work with my characters, and as I began using the model I began adapting it for my own style pretty easily. You could say things clicked nearly immediately. (If you have any interest in the details of this process, let me know!)

—Books I Discovered:

After I finish slogging through Murtagh (ugh), the next book I have in my sights is Atom Bomb Baby (Brandon Gillespie). All I know is this book was sold to me on the premise of, more or less, “Atom Punk (think Fallout) hasn’t been explored enough yet as a genre, especially in novel form.” As a fan of sci-fi, “punk” reading, and the novel’s weird art, I was hooked.

Colby Dunn’s panel (the one on character building) impressed me enough that I decided to check out his books, and I discovered his first, Crimson Sun, was available in ebook form for free. It’s the first of a completed trilogy, no less, so if I like this epic fantasy debut I’ll have a lot more to send your way. I don’t know a lot about it, other than it’s supposed to feel familiar, but with a twist.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is at… 38,000 words? Yeah, last week was not a good week for me for new writing. It was a good week for planning—I plotted characters out, I figured arcs out, I answered questions I had, all as part of applying the learning I received at LTUE. But now I need to apply the most important lesson of all: FINISH. Next week I want to give you a much higher number.

Send-Off

Read anything good lately? Or watched anything great? Have any more LTUE questions? Let me know!