I finished the synthetic outline of my latest android novel. That’s an outline made after-the-fact, by writing a brief synopsis of each of the 33 chapters. In reviewing it, I discovered redundancies, excesses, omissions, and nonsequiturs. Redundantly, I had refuted … Continue reading
Six characters write diaries and letters, along with the transcript of a conversation, all presented in rotation. There are no dramatic scenes in real time, and no plot. Everything is remembered and told from afar through a haze of maudlin emotion. … Continue reading
I’ve broken my own rule about letting a new manuscript marinate for a couple of months. My recently completed android novel was calling out to me from the darkness of its disk drive. It lacks a traditional story structure and I thought … Continue reading
This “Bible” is very informative, detailed, well-organized and accessible; more comprehensive and with a wider range of examples than Syd Field’s classic, Screenplay. On the other hand, it’s nearly 500 pages of 8.5” x 11” text, so it’s formidable. Despite … Continue reading
The characters in my latest android story did not want to quit. It took longer than I anticipated to tie up loose ends and bring the thematic material to a conclusion. I ended at 77,500 words, about what I’d had … Continue reading
This is a very enjoyable read, although it makes no sense whatsoever, which is how I often feel about reading Faulkner, someone who I believe Flanagan had in mind here, along with the poet, Rimbaud. The story is structured roughly … Continue reading
A friend was horrified to read the first writing assignment in her just-started class. It read, “Write a story about a 20-something telling his/her parents, who are having their own marital problems, about an impending marriage to a much older … Continue reading
I’ve heard about this happening to other writers. You’re almost at the end of your masterwork when a book comes out with great fanfare and it’s the book you’re just completing. I’m within ten thousand words of finishing my android … Continue reading
I was listening to a lecture on linguistics and the subject was Proto-Indo-European, (PIE) the prehistoric ancestor of English and many other languages. Words in the PIE language are derived from comparative analysis of all known existing and historical languages in a … Continue reading
You never think it will happen, but it happened to me. I just finished a chapter for my new novel, I’m reading it over, and bink! the screen goes black. The computer is dead as a stone. I push the … Continue reading