The Value of Encouragement

I mentioned last time that something interesting happened while I was working on the revisions for Black Wolf. This needs a little backstory, so here we go with a flashback scene. Go back twenty years. I finished the first complete version of Black Wolf (then, the full title was Black Wolf, Demon Wolf – I got tired of typing that). It wasn’t my first novel, but we don’t talk about the first two; this was the first one I had hopes for. A very good friend and mentor, a local mystery author, read it for me and gave me her…

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Who Am I Writing For?

Well, I did it to myself again. No matter how many times it happens, no matter how many times I learn the lesson, it still creeps back up and ambushes me again. Write what you want to write, write what sings to you. Forget what you can complete and present to the world; if it isn’t singing to you right now, this moment, then any work you do on it will be poorer quality and at best not worth it, at worst discouraging enough to interfere when it should be singing later. Don’t ever, ever try to modify the content…

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Commercial publishing or staying indie

Note from 2001: this was written in 2013 and does not take into account sites like Scribble Hub, Royal Road, and others that allow sharing novels or serials with an audience that is already interested in finding something new to read. I’ve been told, and not always by people who could be expected to be rather biased in my favour, that the novels I write are on a par with what’s available commercially – works that were actually picked by an editor from a publishing house as being something they want to offer. At one point, I did try to…

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