Thursday, October 18, 2012

On the Road with Hamlet

I wanted to get away, kind of like Bram Stoker on his yearly breaks to Whitby working on Dracula.  Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.  I have a weekend, a ticket to see Hamlet at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, and I'm not working on anything like Dracula - more like Nancy Drew meets Harry Potter (nothing sparkly, I promise).  So, hope you are all having a lovely October, and will check in from time to time on the progress (so far, volume one is complete and submitted to Harper Voyager - fingers crossed).

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Andrew is the Best!!!

Andrew Wille - Book Doctor
Check out Andrew's blog at http://wille.org/blog/

Kurt Vonnegut on How to Write a Short Story

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
   
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
   
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
   
4. Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action.
   
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
   
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
   
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
   
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible, to heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where, and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.