Stages of drafts as I understand them: Draft one: adrenaline. You want to get your first draft on paper as soon as humanly possible. Never once in the history of writing has what a writer wrote first (there’s a tongue twister for you) been what appears in print. (Online, yes… but we’ll let that go. The age of insta-print is… well… it has it’s positive and negative side.) Never. not once. You can’t and should NOT try for perfection the first time through. The first time is for

Believable villains. Look… it’s easy to make a moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash villain. Look at basically any movie or tv show. Look at 99% of them. Go ahead. I’ll wait. *ahem* Here’s the skinny on villains: they’re a foil for your protagonist(s). Literally. Think of a book as a sword fight. Well, fencing match, if we’re going to follow the ‘foil’ metaphor through. Evert time your protagonist swings, the villain parries. Clang! That clang is the actual conflict. Maybe it

Always be writing. I’ve said it before. But unless you have product, the editing, marketing, and sales just won’t happen. I don’t care how flawed it is: finish it. I don’t care how rough it is: finish it. I don’t care how you deus ex’ed the ending: FINISH IT. You wanna push words? You gotta push words. Simple as that. Some people write 200 words a day. Some people write 500. Some, 2000. Stephen King shoots for five pages a day, according to On Writing, his memoir. But… is tha

First off, 2016 can bite my shiny metal ass. And it couldn’t even go out quietly. Had to grab one last one at the end, didn’t it? Father Mulcahey from MASH died on the very last day of the year. (I’m sure thousands of other people did, too, but he’s the one I knew more or less personally.) Well, it was a tumultuous year. I don’t need to tell you; if you’re reading this, you know. If you weren’t born yet, you aren’t reading this. (I dunno… maybe the next evolutionary step inst