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Tag Archives: Fantasy

Writing, (W)romance, and Wraiths

To sex or not to sex? Today’s post is all about paranormal and fantasy romance. Rawr.

Your Prewriting Recipe for Mock Turtle Soup

You’ve given your story a working title. You’ve honed your story question to a perfect, sharp edge. You’ve crafted a satisfying, useful short synopsis. That means it’s time to sink your teeth into the Mock Table of Contents!

Cut It Out! C.S. Friedman and the Dreaded Prologue

Tweet Welcome, dearest writers and readers, to my first feature post! This week we’re on about prologues. Should we have them? Or should we cast them upon the cleansing fires of editing and rewrites, never allowing them to mar another of our manuscripts again? The Problem with Prologues Rumor has it that your editor (you […]

Why Rewriting Is Part of Writing

Tweet If everything goes as planned, my first novel, a fantasy, will be published by the Consortium later this year. I’ve been working on it for nearly six years. I think it’s ready. You should have seen the first draft I wrote back in 2007. It was, in a word, awful. The main character was pathetic, […]

The Benefits of Prewriting

Tweet In last week’s intro post, I posited that not prewriting your novel is like not taking a map on a quest (which happens to end with facing down a fire-breathing dragon). Today we’re going to take a look at that metaphorical map and figure out just what it really is. Caveat Caveat emptor: Let […]

Dragons, and Something to Blow Your Nose On

Tweet Author with Penchants Greetings, fellow writerly one! I’m Courtney Cantrell. You might know me from the column I used to write here at Unstressed Syllables, What I Learned About Writing This Week. Or you might have followed me over here from my own site, Court Can Write. In either case, you already know that […]

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Tweet It seems I owe you an apology. I’ve been absent. I could offer the frantic bustle of the holiday season as my defense, but that’s not really it. Honestly…I didn’t realize I had let the blog lapse. I’ve been conscientiously working to improve my presence on social media in general (primarily through Twitter and […]

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Being Irritable

Tweet If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a myriad of sources over the past ten years, it’s that I should never ignore myself when I feel irritable. I am not a person easily given to irritation. It takes a lot to push my buttons. Injustice is pretty much the only thing that can get […]

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from the Basics

Being sick resets one’s brain to the basics. In three brief points, lets discuss some basics of good writing. We’ll look at story structure, rules for writing, and audience analysis.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from King and Straub

Tweet Mr. Stephen King and Mr. Peter Straub, that is. These two gentlemen co-wrote a couple books, if you didn’t know. And I’m currently enjoying the second of that couple most muchly, yup. The first, The Talisman, I read years and years ago. So, before I started this new read, I hied myself to my […]