Find Your Voice: the most annoying advice ever

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Mainly writing ones. In addition to the novel-writing ones, I also love Scriptnotes, featuring John August and Craig Mazin, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. But mainly, I look to those...

How Chuck Palahniuk made me a Better Writer with One Essay

I originally planned to release Three Years Dead at the end of January. Why delay it? Well, the simple answer is Chuck Palahniuk. And, to the author of Fight Club, Rant, and Choke, I’m grateful. Palahniuk wrote an essay called Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs that went...

When the Creative and the Commercial Come Together

It’s sweet, isn’t it? You have a sudden epiphany that something you’re doing in your current novel might have a negative commercial impact on a different novel. It can make a reader uncomfortable when a writer starts out glorifying a violent vigilante in one story,...

Early Reviews – His First His Second

So, I told myself I’m not going to be one of those writers who constantly crows about his great reviews and quotes them every few days.  However, it’s still early in the life of His First His Second, so I guess I have to whore myself around a bit and push...

American-ese vs Britishisms

This week there was a fairly interesting discussion over at KindleBoards regarding why some Americans cannot stand to read British English in novels. Some readers, apparently, go so far as to dish out a one-star review for bad grammar and terrible spelling errors, and...