Writing Wibbles

The #1 thing, as always: new blog followers. It is with great pleasure I welcome my fellow #TuesdaySerial staffer and home maintenance slave Tony Noland to the free-range insane asylum! Tony, your badge is on the table — there’s a stun gun too, but the inmates are cowed by your mad tiling skills so you probably won’t need it.

You may have noticed a slight change in the bylines here on the blog. I’ve been slowly working toward this for a while now, first on Twitter and new sites… so here I bid a fond farewell to my FARfetched alias. Something you have to do when you want to get your writing out there, is to go by your actual name (or a reasonable-sounding pen name). I’ll still keep my AIM email for a while though.

Okay, on to the writing stuff. I’ve started a new serial in the Accidental Sorcerers world. The story (the latest #FridayFlash) has done pretty well so far, with a solid pageview count and more comments than any other story has received since early December. Many of the comments were requests for more, and by Monday evening I ended up with a 4700-word story in five parts. I hope the rest is as well-received.

For this story, I tried to apply lessons learned from listening to PodCastle 194: Their Changing Bodies.

1. Get to the point quickly. About 20 minutes in, I nearly turned off the podcast, because it felt like it was just meandering around in teen angst. Fortunately, turbulent traffic kept me from following through, and five minutes later I was hooked. I don’t want to give away the story line; go give it a listen. Subscribe to PodCastle while you’re at it. One of the good things about having an hour commute is that I can almost always listen to a complete story without a break.
2. Make visuals count. One of the things I noticed about Their Changing Bodies was that every line had a purpose. There were a lot of lines that could have easily been amusing throwaways, or just nice detailing, but they all contributed to the plot in some fashion.

I might not have racked up a perfect score on #2, but it did prevent me from including several throwaway lines. There are one or two things that will be picked up in later chapters… which might get missed by readers who don’t go back and read the whole thing again, but I’m hoping that I’ll have a short YA novel when all is said and done. I do need to impose some kind of arc on it, though.

While I’m not making lots of progress on my so-called “front burner” projects, Accidental Sorcerers is a fun world to write in and at last keeps me writing until one or the other projects boils over.