For the want of a civilization, a name was lost.
My summer project* was to finish Aqualee’s Hero. This was my NaNo novel in 2009. I wrote 50,000 words in November, and then another 30,000 in December. By January, I hated it. I’d spent two months doing nothing but staring at these characters. I wanted to burn them all and scrap the whole concept. Fortunately, my friends have wiser heads** and told me to shove it in a box until I could stand to work with the thing again. This didn’t happen, not exactly. Aqualee’s Hero has the privilege (or curse) to be part of my Guardian Wars universe. I started inventing this place...
Read MoreCurse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
Stories are like childhood friends. Some days you’d be perfectly happy to cuddle up, get married, and spend the rest of your lives together. Other days, you want to take them by the shoulders and give them a good shaking until they start working properly. They’re also a little bit alive. The majority of writers I know (and by ‘know’ I’m using the term loosely to include personal friends on the road to publication, correspondence with actual authors, blogs, and the like) have all bemoaned the fact that while they are trying to take the story from A to B, the story...
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