Book Brouhaha

Creating characters is like playing a role playing game.  In fact, now that I think about it, games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder are  fantasy writing.  The point being that you have to create your characters with abilities and limitations and then adhere to them in order to create a believable adventure. Continuing with the RPG (Role Playing Game) example, if a character has 20 health left and a sword with 5 attack, that's all that character gets.  It's very straightforward.  It means that once that character's health gets below 20, he's dead.  If that character is facing a monster, the maximum amount of damage that he can inflict with one hit is 5.  So a monster with 10 health would require two hits. I'm using the RPG example because it involves numbers.  Numbers are simple and creating an immersive world for readers is not.  However, the "environmental logic" is the same.  Characters must adhere to a set of rules--th...

Summary: Tales of the unexpected, ranging from stories of crime and vengeance through to ghostly happenings in an ancient mansion. Review: A pleasant collection of flash fiction length pieces.  The stories are engaging and fun to read, though a bit simplistic with their twist endings.  Most veteran crime readers will be able to predict the ending of each story before it happens.  With some polish I could see Morris' style becoming quite thought-provoking. Still, the flash fiction was written well.  Each story was a complete experience and didn't feel rushed, which I appreciated.  It's worth picking up a copy if you want an easy afternoon read. 3/5 stars Reviewed by Alain Gomez Buy this collection on Amazon .

They say that more than half of our communication comes from non-verbal cues.  Naturally, this has led to a hundred studies trying to figure out exactly  how much communication is verbal.  But you get the idea.  Suffice to say that if you were to watch a movie and put the sound on mute you could still generally tell what sorts of emotions the characters are experiencing. Unfortunately, this is something that tends to get easily lost during the writing process.  Writing is about words... the verbal part of communication, right? Wrong. To me, the most memorable books are the ones that create a world for you to become lost in.  You love the characters because they seem real even if the setting is in an alternate universe.  In order for that setting to become real the writer must give the reader non-verbal details to latch on to. For example, telling the reader that a character is angry doesn't create much of an impact.  How angry ...

I've been beta reading for authors for quite some time now.  It has been an interesting process, to say the least.  I love that it allows me to meet fellow authors that are all in a different stage of their writing career.  The process of helping them has, in turn, helped me a great deal.  Beta reading forces me to take a much closer look at the flaws in my own writing and to try and figure out ways to fix these issues. What's interesting to me is that many writers suffer from the same mistakes while working through that first novel or short story.  I've done enough of these beta projects to now see patterns in what I come across.  So I thought it would be useful to do a blog series on these common mistakes. In each blog post in this series I'll address the mistake and a possible solution to this type of mistake.  However, I feel the need to add a small disclaimer: I'm not a best selling author that makes millions of dollars from my writing.  ...

My new favorite thing is noise canceling headphones.  I've had a pair for years but lately I've been using them to write.  Game changer! I'm generally very focused once I get into a focusing zone.  However, everything about my brain requires long stretches of start up/shut down.  It takes me at least an hour to fully wake up in the morning (and that's with coffee) and when I go to sleep it's a several hour long process.  The same goes for focusing.  I can work for long stretches of time but calming down enough to actually get into the focusing zone can require some work. So I took the advice of a friend and tried headphones with music.  I made myself a playlist of classic music--no words!  It took some getting used to.  I'm a musician so my first instinct when I hear music is to focus on it.  But I kept the volume turned down low and I made a point of having the music on only when I'm writing .  If I turned away to look at my ph...

Summary:   After twenty five years serving as the lone human Monitor of the Interstellar Ark, Hermes, Orion is scheduled to be placed back in his hibernation chamber with the other members of the crew. Knowing that he will die there and be replaced before the ship’s voyage is over, he decides that he won’t accept that fate. Whatever it takes he will escape Hermes and see space again, even if it means defying the regulations of his only friend -- the ship-wide artificial intelligence known as Dan. Review: Turning fifty is a mental milestone for most people.  But it's a bit more than that for Bruno's main character, Dan.  Fifty marks the end of his life. This is a phenomenal short story.  Bruno cleverly touches on a number of everyday life and aging issues in a very short space of time.  The setting of the space ark traveling for 200 years to the next closest inhabited planet was brilliant.  Dan literally has nowhere he can go but forward, ...

Now that the wedding chaos has finally died down, I'm forcing myself back into a more intense writing schedule.  To my credit, I did keep up my daily writing!  How many words I got down on the page fluctuated greatly but Monday through Friday I would sit my butt in the chair and do something. It was actually a nice way to spend the year.  I mentioned this before in earlier blogs but it allowed me the freedom to enjoy writing again.  I wasn't adding words for the word count sake, I was writing them because I liked the way they connected to each other.  Given everything else that was going on, it was perfect for the time. But now it's not so perfect. I have finally reached the mental state where publisher me has resurfaced.  Author me reigned supreme for too long!  The slowness in which I complete stories is now starting to bother me because it feels like I have too much to tell and never enough time to write. So I'm forcing myself back into dail...