If there was one chapter that summed up my experience of writing Petition, it was this chapter, which has the dubious honor of being the most revised chapter in the entire book. For the most part, I write very clean first drafts. That doesn’t mean they don’t require editing—they do!—but I generally have a good…
I always went into writing with the belief that I am an outliner. I’m the kind of person who lives their life according to a cascading collection of one-, three-, five-, and ten-year plans, where each group of short-term goals feeds into a carefully considered set of long-term goals. But in actual fact, I’m not.…
This is the second-most-revised chapter in the entire book. There’s so much pressure to have a great, hooky first sentence. That pressure extends to the first paragraph, the first page, the first chapter… (To be honest, the pressure’s there for the whole first book, and then every book that follows. Writing is hard.) But there’s…
Prologues have a bad rap. There are readers out there who have been so badly burned by bad prologues that they will not read any more books with prologues. (I’m not one of them. As a rule, I like my epic fantasy with prologues.) But this was my debut novel. I was going to have…
Fantasy maps occupy a weird space for me as a reader. I don’t tend to do more than look at them briefly before I start reading, and I rarely go back to study them in detail afterwards, yet if an epic fantasy novel doesn’t have any maps, it somehow detracts from the reading experience for…