Writers are often advised to read. It's great advice, and typically the only thing stopping writers from reading is not having enough time in the day. I've yet to meet a writer that doesn't enjoy reading and visiting imaginary worlds that they didn't have to create themselves.

In addition to being advised to read, writers are often advised to read outside of their genre. It's good advice, to open one's mind. If you write romance, pick up a political thriller. If you write fantasy, pick up a memoir. Reading in a different genre from what you write exposes you to different writing styles and paces than you might experience in your own genre, and can give you ideas.

I accidentally stumbled upon another type of book that can inspire you to write...old books. On a recent trip to the library, I was looking in my (preferred) fantasy genre for the Shannara series by Terry Brooks, or something similar. the 1970s and 80s provided a wealth of fantastic fantasy, and I wanted to revisit this particular series after close to 20 years, because I knew it would appeal to me more as an adult than as a child.

Unfortunately, my library has a small fantasy section, and I had to order in The Sword of Shannara, so in the meantime I needed to grab another book. I'd been there for a long time, and finally I panicked and grabbed a trilogy (bound as one book) off the shelves. The back linked it to Tolkien, and a brief peek inside showed it as being from the 1980s. Perfect! I checked it out and brought it home.

The book was the Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake, and it was originally published in 1950s.

the 1940s and 50s were also good for fantasy, with writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis producing works that are still widely read 70 years later. I would not place Gormenghast up there with The Hobbit or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It has important characters with names like Sepulchrave, and the pacing is so slow that I'm about 50 pages in and nothing has really happened yet. Even the birth of the eponymous character Titus Gormenghast wasn't exciting.

So why am I excited enough about this book to blog about it? Because, the pacing is so slow, the writing so descriptive and poetic without progressing the story at all, that it inspires me to work on my own story. Nothing is happening in the book I am reading, but I can sure as heck make something happen in the book I'm writing.

Basically, in addition to reading outside of the genre you write in, I advise reading something within your own genre that is written in a different style than what you write. Contemporary romance novels might benefit from reading Jane Austen, or attempting to find a more obscure contemporary of the esteemed Austen. Gormenghast is highly acclaimed, and I find it incredibly boring. So, to make a long story long, find a "good" book in your genre that you think is boring or out of date, and see if it doesn't inspire you to write something better.

If it works, or if you've used this trick before, I'd love to hear about it.

Another NaNoWriMo has come and gone. Some emerged victorious, while others can proudly proclaim that at least we tried. Whether you hit your 50,000 or not, be proud of whatever writing you accomplished in November. 50 words or 50,000, if you wrote, you're a writer.

Now, with the possibility of a fresh draft in hand, some people will be looking forward to editing and publishing. To this, I have a word of caution:

Wait.

I'm not one of those naysayers or Negative Nancys who wants to quash other self-publishers and throw up barrier after barrier to keep the from pushing that "publish" button, but I do want each self-published book to go out as the best version of itself. Not every book has the potential to be a best-seller, but I do want each and every book, and each and every author, to be the best it can be.

And for this reason, a quick read-through of your hastily written NaNo project before uploading it to KDP is not necessarily the best way to go. You're riding that writer's high, flying on your accomplishment, and nothing will bring you crashing down faster than an honest beta reader or professional editor pointing out the parts of your novel badly in need of improvement.

However, for your novel to be the best it can be, beta readers and editors are needed. Even the best rough draft is just that, rough, and deserves more attention from you. So print out some copies to have beta-readers comment on, go through it yourself with a fine-toothed comb to fix anything that you know needs fixing, and if at that point your really set on publishing, I can't recommend enough the importance of hiring an editor.

There are a lot of great places to find editors. Reaching out to your writer friends on social media, or finding out who your favorite bloggers use/used (thEditors for me) is a great first step. A quick google will turn up dozens of good options, as will a trip to a freelancing site like Upwork or Fiverr. You can also head over to my own Editing Services page, where I offer beta reading, content editing, and copy editing services below market rate.

I strongly recommend that, before you hire anyone to edit your novel, you have them edit a sample of it first (1000-2000 words should be enough). If they're unwilling to do this for free, I'd move on to someone else. Paying someone money to do a poor job is a waste of money, and refusing to pay for a service--even a crappy service--can give you a bad name in the writing community. So do your homework, and when you're ready, do what it takes to make sure your book is the best version of itself before you go to publish.

​Today, in honor of the break-neck deadline many of us have imposed upon ourselves for NaNoWriMo, I want to remind everyone that writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint.

Many of us live our life with deadlines, and in the past I've often written about the importance of deadlines, but for anyone who is feeling the crushing grip of anxiety that comes from knowing that--short of divine intervention--you will not be meeting your NaNo (or whatever) goal this month of year, I want to remind you that meeting that deadline--or not--isn't the end of the world.

Self-imposed deadlines are good, and striving to meet them is healthy, but rather than setting them up as the be-all, end-all, let me offer some counter advice, especially when it comes to editing: 

Take. Some. Time.

Take some time between finishing your first draft and jumping into editing. Take some time between finishing that first edit and jumping into the second round.

There are stories out there about books that take 10 or 20 years to write and publish, and although that might be a longer timeframe than many of you are comfortable with, remember that it also isn't necessary to pump out several books a year. Or even one a year.

Once you've finished your rough draft, however long that may take, take some time to let the story settle. Step away for a week or a month, brainstorm new ideas for, or step away from writing altogether and spend your time reading, or painting, or playing Madden 2019 and waiting to see how long you can play before the music drives you crazy.

Take some time to come back refreshed and recharged, instead of burned out on your story.

​Take some time, but not too much.

Set yourself a goal for when to come back. No shorter than two weeks, no longer than two months. Mark it on your calendar, or set a notification on your phone, and on that pre-ordained day, sit back down and get back to work. If you don't start then, it's too easy to walk away from that book for years, letting it languish in a drawer or a dusty corner of your hard drive, filled with potential it will never reach without your attention.

So give yourself two weeks or two months, then get back to work. Take some time to rest, then make some time to edit. Few people enjoy editing as much as they enjoy writing, but it's a necessary process. And when you've edited it as much as you can, if you have aspirations of publishing, hire an editor to take it a step further.

Today i'm excited to announce that Christina "DZA" Marie has agreed to write a guest post on world building for Fantasy authors. Since world-building is so multi-faceted, and the methods vary so much from author to author, I'm excited to have another author share her take on how to successfully build another world.

So without further ado, here's an expert take by Christina:

First off, I want to give a big thank you to Jordyn for letting me take over the blog for today.
Anyone who’s taken even a cursory look at my blog Dragons, Zombies & Aliens knows that I have a graphic novel series coming out in November (written by me and illustrated by John Hawkins), which I am really, really excited for. It’s an epic fantasy called Sovadron set in a world based off of colonial America, and involves demons, gods, magic, war, adventure, and all that good stuff. Jordyn wanted to know how the heck I went about world-building this monster of a story that’s probably going to take at least a decade to complete.
Well, I’ll be honest. When I first started writing Sovadron, I didn’t do any world-building. That’s because the story came from my family’s Dungeons & Dragons adventures. The five main characters—Shakairra, Rain, Gundar, Elkvein, and Quarrel-Karn (later reconfigured into a guy named Kyne)—were our characters. I basically just wrote down the story we made to the best of my memory, which was of course set in the D&D world, complete with cities, creatures, and magic system.
At this time I was a teenager and didn’t have much interest in actually publishing this thing. But as time went on I realized I had a pretty good story here. The only problem was, you know, plagiarism.
I realized that I had to completely re-design the world of my characters, which would in turn affect those characters and the story itself. I started with the traditional medieval European setting that most Western epic fantasies are based on, but after a few drafts of that I realized I was bored out of my mind with such an overused setting and decided to try something new. Which is what led me to create a society based on post-colonial America.
I couldn’t recall a single epic fantasy based on that time period, and since I’d studied it in college, it was a setting that I was already somewhat familiar with. Now all I had to do was figure out how it would work with fantasy, elves, and demons.
Every author has a different method of creation, so this one may not work for everyone. But here’s how I break it down.
The first question I ask is what is this society’s main values, their core beliefs. Usually I already know the answer to this because I already have an idea of what the story is going to be, and the role of that society. In the case of Luria, the country where most of Sovadron takes place, they value freedom, hard work, and martial strength.
After that it’s the people. What’s their social structure? Is there a caste system? A patriarchy? Any form of racism or religious persecution? Don’t forget the LGBTQ+ community. Can a pansexual like Shakairra or a gay dwarf like Gundar be out and proud without consequence, or would their careers and families demand they keep it hidden?
This naturally leads into questions about their views on love and sex, as well as their religion(s), government and legal systems, and technology, which in some cases can include magic. Those are big-ass questions that could each have their own blog post, and I usually only briefly outline the general model before moving on to other parts.
By now it’s time (some would probably argue past time) that we look at the geography.  Where is this society located? Is it in a desert? An island?  A forest? Don’t forget climate: is it rainy? An arctic wasteland? Does it have the European four seasons or three Egyptian seasons that revolves around the flooding of rivers?
This will help you figure out what they do for food, architecture, and clothing. Are they a hunter-gatherer society? Farmers? Nomadic merchants? Do they live in igloos, tents, or stone castles? As for clothing, that’s going to be informed not just by the climate but also by the religion, core values, and social structure we mentioned above. Just look at the difference between how people dress in the Middle East versus  Arizona: similar climates, very different dress code.
Now we get into the fun stuff, literally! What does this society do for fun? Their sports, games, and recreation. How about their art and music? Again, these are influenced by social structure. In the United States, we pay professional athletes a lot more than artists, and the former tend to get more respect. Then we have language. Does everyone speak the same language, or are there several? Different dialects? What about common sayings and turns of phrase?
Finally, what is this society’s relationship with others? Are they friendly with their neighbors, or constantly seeking to conquer them? Are they located on a major trade route like the Silk Road, or are they isolated from everyone—willingly or otherwise. How do international politics play on domestic society?
You might notice I keep saying society instead of world. That’s because, depending on how many different countries/tribes/groups you have in your story, you will have to do this more than once.
Sovadron has multiple countries and cultures. Luria is the main setting, a new country that used to be colonized by their neighbor to the south, Daerstyn, with which they still have a rocky relationship, as well as their shared neighbor to the west, Harena. Then there’s the Demon Wastes, the dwarven tribes, the cave elves, and more.
Sovadron will be released on November 16th. You can get more information here, and sign up for email updates here.
What are your methods of world-building? Let me know on my blog or Twitter. Thanks again, Jordyn! ☺


Links:
Blog: http://www.dzamarie.com/blog
Sovadron info: http://www.dzamarie.com/sovadron.html
Sign-up sheet: https://promotions.privy.com/campaigns/621271
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CM_DZA ​

With the rapid arrival of NaNoWriMo 2018, and my (perhaps ill-gotten) decision to make The King's Son my NaNo novel instead of continuing on with The Talented sequel, I needed a way to track all of my writing for the month.
 
To do this, I fought a bitter battle with Microsoft Excel, further complicated by the fact that I should have bought a new computer years ago, so every move I do on Excel has a serious lag. I'm far from an Excel aficionado, to the point where I wouldn't even lie about it on a resumé and hope to cram in the skills before I started, but I managed to come up with some simple graphs and equations to chart my goals and actual progress for the month in this handy little spreadsheet. 

So far, having a visual representation of what I have done and what I need to do is really helping me to organize and track my writing goals for the month.

So my question is, what do you do to keep yourselves on track and writing?

It's Day One of NaNoWriMo 2018, and I'll have to keep this short so I can get back to writing, but I wanted to wish everyone participating this year good luck and remind you all that I will be posting what I write each day on my NaNoWriMo 2018 page. It's the sequel to The Emperor's Daughter, so if you haven't read the first one in the series, head on over to Smashwords and get it for free, or go to Amazon and buy it for 99 cents.

National Novel Writing Month is right around the corner, and this year I will be working on the sequel to The Emperor's Daughter. I'm also going to try something completely different this year...posting what I write every day so that people have the experience to see how the sausage is made, so to speak.

I've noticed during my journey as an editor that a lot of people get so nervous about how "bad" they think their rough draft is that they get discouraged and either stop writing the first draft or never attempt to improve the first draft into something that is publishable (or just finished if publishing isn't their goal).

In the interest of radical transparency, I want to show other writers just how rough a rough draft can be, and hopefully by the end of the year I will be publishing it as a serial that has polished, respectable, readable parts based on what is sure to be a "bad" first draft (It's hard to write a good first draft of 50,000 words in 30 days). Since The Emperor's Daughter was a novel originally written just for enjoyment and offered for free, I believe that showing this process can only help other authors on their journey, although fans of The Emperor's Daughter might want to wait to read the finished product if you're not interested in a wild and unwieldy draft.

​I also plan to post the editing process on my editing website so that people can get an idea of what professional editing should be, with the caveat that editing your own novel is never as good as paying a professional editor to do that work for you, regardless of whether you are good enough at editing to offer professional services to others. 

I probably won't be starting at midnight this year, because that is way past my bedtime, but there's a good chance I'll be starting at 4 in the morning on Thursday, so feel free to join me! Remember, even if you don't "win" NaNoWriMo, everyone who tries is a winner in my mind.

 hSo that scene list continues to work for me, and I've kept up with my writing (almost) daily. I started out with seventeen scenes, which I'd mentioned not being overly enthused with because that would make for a very short novel, but I've already added six more as I wrote, so I think the length will grow organically. Still Snowflake-ish, but not perfect adherence to the method, which is what I'd predicted from the beginning.

I also found a new inspiration to keep me going. If planning my novel out with the Snowflake Method keeps me going by giving me something concrete to work with, stumbling upon the #OctWritingChallenge hashtag on Twitter gave me some external motivation.

National Novel Writing Month is next month, and next week's blog post will be on that, and hopefully by then I will have finally decided whether to have The Talented's sequel or The Emperor's Daughter's sequel for my NaNo project this year. However, my challenge for this month is only 500 words or 1 hour of editing a day.

This Monthly Twitter Writing Challenge has apparently been going on for years, originally geared toward people who couldn't meet NaNoWriMo's goal of 50,000 words in a month because life is just too busy but could commit to a smaller goal of 500 words a day, and so far it has really worked to inspire me to hit a very reachable goal. 500 words a day is just enough that you have to make a point of it, because you won't accidentally stumble into it, but isn't so much that you have to set the rest of your life on hold.

It's also a nice change from NaNo because it's 500 words every day. No making up for missed days. And you get to share it on Twitter, which makes for a fun community experience.

It's also getting me ready for NaNo by getting me writing daily again, a habit which is great to have and which I suffer to form again once I've broken it.

Unfortunately, blog posts don't count for #OctWritingChallenge, so I'm off to working on my novel again. There's a new 500 words/day writing challenge every month, so if you want to write in NaNo but can't manage 50k, check out #NovWritingChallenge on November 1st. 

I've blogged before about how I like to write my stories out long-hand first. I tried that in at least one of my first five attempts at writing the sequel to The Talented, so on the sixth time around I didn't bother breaking out the ol' pen and paper. And so far, the scenes I've written using the Snowflake Model on the computer seem to be good.

But this weekend, I headed up north for a vacation with my family, and as part of this I left my computer behind. But, as you fellow writers and other creative people might predict, the creative bug hit me while I was up there, computerless.

So I went old school. I grabbed a pen and some paper, and I sat and wrote. I had left off after finishing scene two, so even though I didn't have my previous work in front of me, I'd done enough planning to know what came next, and I was able to pick it up there. I wrote scene three while sitting on the couch in front of the fire, surrounded by family and friends, and it was nice.

Relaxing.

Healing.

I was able to enjoy the process, and knowing that I enjoy it has helped make me excited about it again. I'll be typing up those pages that I wrote later today, and I have a good feeling about them. I feel like they will be worth typing up, and that this time around, the book I'm working on will be worth writing.

So anyone out there feeling despair about their work, don't give up. Try a different planning method, as I've detailed the past two weeks, and if that doesn't work, try a different execution method.

Go old school if you write your first drafts on a computer. Go "new school" and type as you write if you're typically a write-first, type later writer. Record yourself on your phone while driving and type it all up or write it all down when you get home if you come up with brilliant ideas while running errands.

Try something different. Different planning; different execution; different outlook.

And find the fun. That's why we do it.

Last week, I discussed how due to serious difficulties writing anything resembling a decent sequel to The Talented, I turned to Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method for help, and planned to fight past my inner laziness to actually complete all the steps.

Well, today I am reporting that I've mostly done that. I did skip the character sketch step for the moment, since it's a sequel and I'm familiar with the characters, although I plan to come back to that if I ever sit down to write and don't know what to put down, because then at least I'm working on the same novel, instead of getting sidetracked again and again.

That said, while I obviously haven't finished writing the sequel yet, I do have a good start on it because I have my scene list down. I've never really made a scene list before. The closest I've come to that would be when writing a NaNo novel like The Emperor's Daughter, where I'd plug in scenes as they came to me in Scrivener until I got something coherent. But that's NaNo, something I do for fun. I take my Talented series more seriously, which is why I'm willing to keep rewriting that sequel again and again until I get it right.

​But back to that scene list...what did I learn?

Firstly, that I preferred writing the long synopsis to the scene list. Secondly, that my scenes don't naturally have enough conflict, and thirdly, that if I try to plot this way, my "novel" will probably have about 20,000 words. As of now, my scene list only consists of seventeen scenes. I know I will end up adding more, but what more I can't see yet, because even though I can see the story better now, I can't decide which added scenes would enhance the story, and which would be fluff. So I'll start with those seventeen and keep the list fluid.

However, despite my dissatisfaction with a scene list of only seventeen scenes, I'm otherwise pleased with the exercise, because that plus the synopsis has allowed me to see this novel for the first time, and I think that means I have a chance of actually completing a draft worth keeping.

So if you're as stuck as I was, try a different plotting method to get the juices flowing. It can't hurt!