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Posts by Blake Smith

Jan 8

16 Comments

An Exercise in Conciseness

If this past week is going to be indicative of the rest of the year, I’m hibernating until next December, writing goals be damned. I’ve been rather ill since the second, and though I think I’m on the upswing, this is going to be a brief post, possibly including a nap break somewhere around… Read more

Dec 25

4 Comments

End of the Year Wrap-Up

I know; everyone does one of these. But it’s Christmas, and the family is about to descend on us for an extravaganza of assorted wackiness that seems to go along with celebrating a holiday. Read more

Dec 11

15 Comments

What’s in a Name?

I’m trying out a pen name. Since I’m going to be writing nice, sweet, little Regency romances under this name, there’s no particular reason to keep it secret. Read more

Nov 27

3 Comments

But It Was Not The End

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and, frankly, I’ll be happy when this month is over. I have a lot of things to be thankful for, but they’re every-day things, like food to eat and a warm place to sleep. The sort of thing that gets overshadowed by all of the upheaval and sadness the universe has dealt out lately. Read more

Nov 13

For Your Entertainment

Life has come at me very fast lately, so I give you this snippet from my short story An American Thanksgiving, which takes place in 1865 and will be available later this week. Thanksgiving seems to be losing some of its importance to American culture in recent years, so I came up with this different take on the holiday stories that are popular at this time of year: Read more

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

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