Endings. Every story has one, but not every story has a good one. What makes some of them work and the rest of them fail? Well, let’s take a look at them. If you do a quick Google search for “kinds of endings,” you find a lot of different ways to categorize the varieties of endings […]
Author Archive > Wendy Wagner
A Writer’s Thanksgiving
My favorite part of Thanksgiving isn’t the big dinner. In fact, since we went veg, we’ve often abandoned the big dinner in order to enjoy wacky and fun meals we’d never eat any other time of year. 2011’s 1960’s Casserole Night was a blast, and this year’s Frozen Cheese Pizza Taste-Off promises to be […]
Being okay with where you are
A few weeks ago, the very wonderful John Anealio wrote a great blog post about getting out of the success grind. What he said made a lot of sense. Sometimes your ego makes the artistic experience painful and miserable, and it’s stupid to turn the joy of our lives into torment. Sometimes you have to […]
When projects die
Sometimes projects die. You can pour your heart into a story or a book and for some reason, it might never reach an audience. Even if it’s a good story–sometimes bad things happen to good projects. I don’t just mean that you sent your work out in the world and it failed to find a […]
Be prepared!
This Tuesday evening, I went to see John Scalzi read at Powell’s Books. The reading was great, and as a bonus, it was packed with people–affable, funny, friendly people. After all, this was a Portland reading. Our community is packed with nice folks. When I found a seat, I was close to handful of friends […]
Let’s be honest here
I’ve been trying to write the perfect post about revising a novel and failing over and over. One part of my problem stems from the total difficulty of the project. I’ve tried to revise four previous novels and I’m in the middle of revising a fifth, and I still feel like I haven’t nailed the […]
Mastering Multiple Point of View Characters–a guest post
I’m super-excited to share this guest post with you guys–Garrett and I were college buddies who reconnected years later through Twitter and a shared love for spec fiction. He has a brand new novel coming out March 5th called Dreamwielder–check it out! Novels with multiple viewpoint characters are common enough, but for some reason you […]
Craters & Gravy
My brother Jak surprised the heck out of me the other day. We were taking a break from some gaming (Arkham Horror, if you’re interested) and readying some dinner. I was in a hurry, so I pulled out two boxes of instant mashed potatoes. “Do you want fake potatoes and gravy or flavored fake potatoes?” […]
Fight Scenes That Sizzle
I write violent fiction. As a kid, I loved action movies and heroic fighting fantasy novels. I read The Iliad and The Odyssey when I was eleven and told my mom I preferred The Iliad because of the fight scenes. To this day, when I sit down to watch a movie, I will always […]
Working With An Agent: Personality Counts (guest post by Mercedes Yardley)
Today’s guest post comes from the talented, kind, and very lovely Mercedes Yardley! She graciously made our blog a stop on her tour promoting her new short story collection, Beautiful Sorrows, which you should probably go buy and then devour like a box of tiny dark chocolates. Me: Hello, Brilliant Agent? Brilliant Agent: Hello, Talented […]
