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Posts by Blake Smith

Nov 2

9 Comments

Character Arcs

I’ve mentioned before that I have no formal training in writing, and like most things in life, I’m just winging it. For a kid who had to have everything planned out to the nth degree, and hated any deviation from the usual, I’ve grown to enjoy the process of starting a job and not quite knowing where it’s going. I find that, if I waited until I had everything planned out perfectly, I’d never start the job, and it’s better to begin with a very basic plan, gather some data, and adjust my plans as I go along. It took me nearly thirty years to learn how to do this, and it’s been relatively successful, aside from occasionally driving my DH up the wall. Read more

Oct 16

7 Comments

Novelty

My Dear Husband gave me some excellent advice yesterday, and I thought I’d share it with you. I was noodling over a book that was in the works, trying to figure out why it was so hard to hard to write, when the prequel was so easy, and he asked, “What’s different about this version of the story? What are you giving the reader that they haven’t seen before?”

Oh. Oops. Read more

Oct 2

11 Comments

Hurry Up and Wait

I’ve said recently, on a few separate occasions, “I feel like my life is in a holding pattern at the moment.” And it’s true; if my life was a book, this would be the part where the author skips over a bunch of stuff so as not to bore the reader to death. Read more

Sep 18

10 Comments

Maintenance

I took my car in for an oil change yesterday, and it took about five times longer than it should have. If I wasn’t trying to cut down on the amount of stuff I own, I would have given it up as a bad job, bought a set of ramps, and changed the oil myself.

Alas, I took another reluctant step toward stereotypical suburban wine-mom-hood (the very idea sends shivers down my spine; I’m fighting it, but that’s a whole ‘nother story), and paid someone to poke under my car while I sat in their office. On the plus side, waiting for almost two hours gave me time to think about maintenance and whether the concept applies to writing. Read more

Sep 4

59 Comments

Back up Your Data!

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Everybody knows that you hit ‘save’ before you walk away from the computer. Read more

Aug 21

20 Comments

Cross-Pollination

As you may have guessed from the title, I’ve been doing a lot of work in my- unfortunately small- garden over the summer, and I have plants on the brain. Weirdly, I’ve made no progress on the gardening-related regency romance that I started last winter. But that’s not what this post is about. Read more

Aug 7

22 Comments

I Cannot Word

Happens every time. I get two-thirds of the way through a book, and I start to hate the sight of the characters. Even the interesting ones. This puts up a mental block in my brain, and I start to go into a tailspin of, “I’m terrible at this! Why did I ever think I could write a book? Nobody likes me; everybody hates me; guess I’ll eat some worms.” Read more

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