M. K. Theodoratus, Fantasy Writer, blogs about the books she reads--mostly fantasy and mystery authors whose books catch her eye and keep her interest. Nothing so formal as a book review, just chats about what she liked. Theodoratus also mutters about her own writing progress or ... lack of it.

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Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Taming Those *#@!& Words: Some Useful Links

The job of every writer is to pile up the words, good, bad, delicious or indifferent. But, what do you do when the words don't come?

One of the sneaky ways I boost my word count is with dialog. For some reason I write dialog faster than most other stuff. Once the dialog is down, I then revise for setting, emotions, reactions, descriptions, and all that other stuff.

We won't go into the quality of my dialog, but Mayra Calvani gave some interesting tips on writing good dialog on a guest blog: Eight Tips to Writing Great Dialog. I found it at S. J. Clarke's website.

Yeah, it's one of the articles that gave me some useful insights into what I'm trying to do. I printed it off ... in hopes I'll be able to find it again ... if and when I ever get around to doing a major revision of something already in my confuser. Why? I think her main points make a good check list when you're retooling your story line.

What else do I double check when I revise? Commas.

Every once in a while, I get knocked for using commas. [Seems I follow the Oxford or some other grammatical rule or other.] A lot of people think I use too many of them. But, I'll keep using them since they help me understand what I'm reading.

I also use a lot of "ing" words -- without caring whether they are gerunds or past participles. I think of "ing" words as indicating on going action. I was happy to see that Kira McFadden over at Novel Publicity & Co. tried to put me straight in her blog on "ing" word useShe tried, but she may have better luck with you.

Of course, once you finish revising ... The Passive Guy gives you some things to consider about self-publishing.  Do you know why you want to self-publish? If you want to be a best-seller, I think you should listen to what he says. Yeah, I know I've self-published ... and plan to self-publish my pig story. But, I'm building a platform which is a different kind of thing from than hoping to sell for fun and profit.

Of course, you're going to have to insert bunches of words into your computer if you're going to revise. So, last but not least, I want to share with you a writing plan that made me tired just looking at it. Kristan Koster wrote about her writing plan for this summer on her blog Impulsive Hearts. How does your summer schedule compare?

I'm keeping my same old, same old. Some days, I even get something new written.

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