I'm going to focus most of these blog posts on writing, my writing, books, movies and anything else that falls into those rough groupings. My personal life I'm leaving out. This is just about the writing.
So, last weekend, I attended Dave Wolverton's writing workshop. Check out his site: http://www.davidfarland.net/. (Yes I know the URL says David Farland, trust me, it's Dave Wolverton's page. It's a not-so-long-story but I'll let him tell it) I can't praise the class enough. If you're serious about writing, as I am becoming, you owe it to yourself to take his classes. It almost makes me wish I lived in Utah.
There were a lot of things I learned from the workshop but the most important and hardest for me to digest is writing for a wide audience So much of what I write is 'stuff I'd want to read'. Naturally that calls for a lot of sex and violence in my work. Dave Wolverton made a lot of good points about writing widely and accessibly means writing what is most marketable. Food for though.
Smooth and Tori stories are inherently niche stories: they're about doing things, sometimes bad things, that most people don't do in their real life. But I love writing them and reading them. I love the magic-haunted, high-tech, fucked-up world they inhabit.
Similarly, the next novel I'm working on is all about what it's like to be a 14 year old boy, to fall for someone way out of your league and take on a task maybe a little above your ability in an attempt to help/impress her. It's fantasy and may even be YA but I'm not sure how wide the audience for it will be. Wider than Smooth Running, no doubt, but I'm wondering if I should change the setting and culture to appeal to readers outside the US.
Anyway, food for thought, things to chew on.
So, last weekend, I attended Dave Wolverton's writing workshop. Check out his site: http://www.davidfarland.net/. (Yes I know the URL says David Farland, trust me, it's Dave Wolverton's page. It's a not-so-long-story but I'll let him tell it) I can't praise the class enough. If you're serious about writing, as I am becoming, you owe it to yourself to take his classes. It almost makes me wish I lived in Utah.
There were a lot of things I learned from the workshop but the most important and hardest for me to digest is writing for a wide audience So much of what I write is 'stuff I'd want to read'. Naturally that calls for a lot of sex and violence in my work. Dave Wolverton made a lot of good points about writing widely and accessibly means writing what is most marketable. Food for though.
Smooth and Tori stories are inherently niche stories: they're about doing things, sometimes bad things, that most people don't do in their real life. But I love writing them and reading them. I love the magic-haunted, high-tech, fucked-up world they inhabit.
Similarly, the next novel I'm working on is all about what it's like to be a 14 year old boy, to fall for someone way out of your league and take on a task maybe a little above your ability in an attempt to help/impress her. It's fantasy and may even be YA but I'm not sure how wide the audience for it will be. Wider than Smooth Running, no doubt, but I'm wondering if I should change the setting and culture to appeal to readers outside the US.
Anyway, food for thought, things to chew on.
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