by Joseph Malik | Jul 20, 2016 | Writing Craft
Let’s just get this out of the way right now. Movies aren’t books. I keep seeing this again and again in blog posts and on forums: writers touching back on movie scenes as examples of dialogue, pacing, and even character description. This makes me mildly...
by Joseph Malik | Jul 18, 2016 | Worldbuilding, Writing Craft
Touching back on language, today, because I found some old beat sheets and dialogue excerpts in my Boxes O’ Worldbuilding a few days ago. And because any day, now, my editor is going to run into the Faerie during the line edit and I’m very likely going to...
by Joseph Malik | Jul 14, 2016 | Writing Craft
When historians look back on my writing career, they will likely concentrate on this post, right here, as the moment that I first officially pissed on the leg of the establishment. Normally when I say things like what I’m about to say, I just drop into the front...
by Joseph Malik | Jul 11, 2016 | Writing Craft
MS Office updated just now. And Word’s grammar checker got even stupider. Now the subject-verb agreement is all jacked up: if you insert a negative adverb, it modifies the verb to correlate with a third-person subject pronoun. This means that auto-correct turns...
by Joseph Malik | Jul 11, 2016 | Writing Craft
I want to talk pacing. This is a thing that I haven’t really noticed anyone else do, although I’m sure that other writers do it, too. Maybe we all do, in our own way. I have a musical background, so I compose my books like a work of classical music. Not...
