A Far Out Fantastic Site

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions.  In this post I have my answer to the IWSG question of the month and then I talk about a current fiction writing problem I’m having--creating a monster character for a short story.   Making Books Into Audiobooks So, the April 6 question is Have any of your books been made into audio books? If so, what is the main challenge in producing an audiobook? I have never had any of my books made into audiobooks but plan to do so eventually. I consider myself overdue for it since audiobooks have a lot of advantages. One advantage is that they draw a bigger audience to your work. There are a lot of people out there who would like more time to read but their busy schedules limit them and so listening to a recording of a book during o...

It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG)  post! Every first Wednesday of the month we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to come up with solutions. Plus, I have some Lightning News Flashes  for you, including news on a new Edgar Allen Poe Funko Pop figure! IWSG For this month’s IWSG, I’m going to start out by responding to the question of the month with a straight answer then respond with an inverted answer. You’ll see what I mean by the latter when we get to it. So, the question of the month: Has a single photo or work of art ever inspired a story? What was it and did you finish it? My first answer: I often don’t write stories based on photo graphs or works of art. Normally when I write my fiction it's based on ideas that randomly come to my mind inspired by specific experiences I’ll encounter or that others have encountered. I’ll record these inspirations as notes in my journal fir...

While we still have some daylight this weekend before the solar eclipse, let me show you my past week in writing, viewing and even drawing. These include advice from son of Stephen King, author Joe Hill and the improved book cover for the paperback version of “Circa Sixty Years Dead”. Joe Hill Interview on You Tube This afternoon, after watching my Saturday morning (vintage) cartoons on YouTube (actually one was a live-action kids sci fi series from the seventies, Space Academy ), I watched an interview with NOS4A2 author Joe Hill. He had a lot of interesting things to say about his writing and useful techniques he uses for it. One of those techniques I’d like to try with my own stories, which helps both story and character development. That technique, he says, is taking a character from a larger work in progress and writing a separate, shorter story around it just for the sake of developing the character. That’s a technique that I can definitely use since I often st...

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com Certain aspects of the creation process in writing fiction can be overwhelming. For me those aspects are  character development  and, although to a lesser extent,  world-building . Just think about it: you have so many levels to take care of in building a single character especially if it’s the protagonist or main character. Sometimes you feel like you have to be God just to make your characters and worlds believable. And being the Supreme Being is just a little impossible. As a writer, you not only have your character’s superficial characteristics such as physical features and speech mannerisms to take care of but also their psychological ones: the ways they think and perceive things, in many cases ways of thinking they do not directly express to the other characters but may still be essential to the story.  Although creating character profiles is relatively easy, if you’re like me you might find it difficult to apply them to...