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My Fiction Site
Because I like to fiddle I’ve rolled out a new fiction site — a showcase of my published work. It now supports reviews and excerpts too. fiction.brentknowles.com Unlike past sites, I’ve built myself an admin page to easily add projects. Because it is really only a couple php and json files I imagine it could be used by others, once I cleaned things up a bit. Let me know if you might be interested and I’ll try to help you set it up now (manually) or prioritize building a setup script for my next month’s sprint/workload. You can explore some rough documentation at: YourOtherMind GitHub Reminders Fun stuff is starting…
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Another Revised Novel
Just finished revisions on another novel. There’s well established advice that you should never fiddle with a completed manuscript unless being asked to do so by an editor, but I do find myself drawn towards re-editing. Often this is because of specific comments on a rejected manuscript. This particular bout of editing however sprung from more general comments an editor gave to a rejected short story of mine. His verbose comments pointed out several errors I make, often, in my work. So anyways, the problem with having five written novels, is that when I see such useful comments, I’m compelled to go through my past work and edit… all five…
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Things You Might Not Know
For those of you who are interested in such things I thought it might be worthwhile to list a variety of facts about me. Some true, some not so much. TRUE FACTS I write short stories and novels I won first place in the third quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest (2009) for my short story ‘Digital Rights‘ I have story reprints available on Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and the Nook I am a game design consultant with Empire Avenue, the Social Stock Market The most recent game I played was Emissary of War My first writing sale was an article on role-playing with different languages in Dragon Magazine.…
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Halfway to Three
This week has been productive writing wise… I just passed the halfway point on my third novel (first draft). If I keep an aggressive schedule I”ll finish the rough draft by early July. Then I’ll spend a month or so reviewing it (while preparing for the fourth novel) and then start in on a revision draft. So it looks like I should be able to start submitting it in early fall. I’ve also done a bit of a course correction. I had almost finished planning the next novel but I’m going to save that planning for later and instead the fourth novel will be a novel set in the world…
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iPad App – Noterize
A few weeks ago I purchased the iPad App Noterize to assist me in editing a novel that is still in draft form. Wow. This is probably the most useful application I have on the iPad. Basically you import a pdf file (from a variety of sources) onto the iPad and can then make markup notes on it using a stylus. You can write notes or paste typed sticky notes on the manuscript and then send the annotated manuscript back to the computer. The editing experience is identical to paper without the mess. It also allows you to record page specific audio notes, which was useful with a story I…
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Self Publishing – Joe Konrath
Been doing a lot of catch up reading over at Joe Konrath’s blog. In case you don’t know he has had tremendous success selling his novels on his own. For years he counseled writers not to self-publish but recently he has changed his stance on this. Very interesting is one mock question and answer he put into that post: Q: You’re such a hypocrite. You’ve got several print deals. A: I signed those deals before I came to this conclusion. I highly doubt I’ll ever sign another print deal. Another great post to review is his most recent one, in response to an earlier post by Richard Curtis. Does this…
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The Novel is Done
So I’ve finished the second novel this year! I still have to edit this one (and sell it!) before anybody sees it of course. Overall I’m satisfied with it. It is too long (115 000 words) but I overwrite my first drafts and I’m sure most of those extra words will disappear. Unlike the first novel there’s no major changes I need to make in the second draft. I’m going to read it over the holidays and come up with a revision plan and start tackling that in February. December and January will be devoted to playing around with some short story ideas I’ve put aside. For the curious this…
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How do you write?
After working many years with BioWare, much of those being spent helping to design tools that writers use, I’ve gained a fair bit of experience with understanding how creative types, create. As a writer myself, I’ve often used my own experience to help guide tool development and even created my own writing platform YourOtherMind . I have tried many things (different software, work methodology, et cetera) but over the last year I’ve stuck with a couple approaches that seem to be working well. Short Stories – Format Conversion Of course the biggest change in my writing process occurred about a year ago when I started doing all my writing within…
