Posts
Writing
On writing fiction, and on the discipline of finishing things.
How to NaNoWriMo
The system that carried me through NaNoWriMo wins: plain text files, automatic backups, no backspace key, and a merciless focus on reaching the end of the story.
Writing is the smallest part in writing
Sanderson-scale word counts make the point: typing the words is the smallest part of writing a novel — the process around them is the real job.
Disappointing endings in Video Games
Finishing Arcania: Gothic 4 left me cold, and it is not alone — a long, spoiler-heavy look at why games keep fumbling the one part you remember: the ending.
Language reversal, from German to English and back to German
One harmless German sentence about a bed, and everything that quietly breaks when you try to carry it into English and back again.
Writing as the main job?
Would you quit tomorrow and write full time if the money stayed the same? Reading how full-time authors actually live made me answer carefully.
Comics and closed lips
A pet peeve turned craft note: if a comic character is speaking, draw the mouth open — and how much a pair of lips can say about how someone talks.
How characters look, Comics versus Books
Comics show you a face; novels hand you a description and let your head do the drawing — on the two ways a reader gets to meet a character.
The coders approach to writing
What years of wrangling structured data teach about novel writing — and why the tidy expand-from-one-sentence method rarely survives contact with a real idea.
How novels work
At 500 words a day, a 100'000-word novel is 200 working days before editing even starts — sobering arithmetic on what a book actually costs.