Tag Archives: John Cleaver

Career and Lifestyle, Season 16, Theory and Technique

16.7: To Series, or Not to Series

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Your Hosts: Dan, Erin, Brandon, Howard

Let’s look a the business considerations of whether that thing you’re writing is a standalone story, or part of a series. The factors are complex, and a single factor (like, say distribution channel) isn’t likely to make the decision clear cut.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson

 

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Examine your favorite series. What were the questions asked in each installment, and in which installment were those questions answered?

The Saxon Chronicles, by Bernard Cornwell

Career and Lifestyle, Season 16, Theory and Technique

16.6: Building Your Brand

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Your Hosts: Dan, Erin, Brandon, and Howard

Branding, in marketing terms for writers, is the process of establishing a recognizable identity—a brand— for you and your works in the marketplace of readers, and people who buy things for readers. In this episode we talk about what our brands need to be doing for us, and how we go about getting them to do that.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Find the elements of your brand from your friends, alpha readers, and beta readers.

Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth, by Rachel Maddow

Archive Seasons 7-10, Project in Depth, Season 10, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 10.48: Project in Depth, The Devil’s Only Friend

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Spoiler Alert! We’ll be discussing the latest John Cleaver book from Dan Wells with author, podcaster, and unrepentant bacon-lover Dan Wells! If you haven’t read it, and you want to be surprised by it, stop listening and grab a copy now!

If you have read it, we apologize on Dan’s behalf for any emotional scarring you may have experienced. Now… give the episode a listen, and learn how Dan managed to do that to you.

 

This episode was engineered aboard The Independence of the Seas by Bert Grimm, and mastered in an orbital communications array by Alex Jackson.

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We are on a ship. Set a story that doesn’t really fit on a ship onto a ship.

The Devil’s Only Friend, by Dan Wells, narrated by Kirby Heyborne

Archive Seasons 7-10, Live Audience, Season 08, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 8.33: Making Non-Human Characters Relatable

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How do you help your readers relate to the non-human characters in your fiction?

The first question to answer is why you’re putting non-human characters in the piece to begin with. What are your goals for that race, culture, or whatever? Once you know that, you can begin addressing the challenge of helping the reader relate.

We talk about our strategies, and we cover examples from Iain Banks’ Look to Windward, Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, and of course from our own work, including Kiss Me Twice, I Am Not a Serial Killer, and The Body Politic.

Immediately Discarded Negative Example, Because the Rathole is Just Too Deep: The 1977 Star Wars Christmas Special

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Depict a conversation between members of a non-human species who do something besides talk.

Thief of Time: Discworld, Book 26, by Terry Pratchett, narrated by Stephen Briggs

Archive Seasons 7-10, Season 07, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 7.34: How to Start the Next One

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Let’s talk about how to start the next one — not the next book in a series, necessarily. Your next project might not leverage the worldbuilding or characters you used in your previous project. We discuss the challenges each of us have faced, and how we’ve cleared those hurdles.

If you’re having trouble letting go of your previous project, this ‘cast should help you, if only because you can see it’s something each of us had difficulty with as well. Of course, we also offer you some pointers and some tricks to make this transition easier.

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“The Hairy Housewife,” because Brandon didn’t hear Howard correctly the first time he said “harried.”

The Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant, wraps up with Blackout, and is a very satisfying example of a series that does something different with each book.

Archive Seasons 1-6, Season 05, Uncategorized

Writing Excuses 5.32: Urban Fantasy

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We begin our discussion of Urban Fantasy with a discussion of definitions, which quickly devolves into an argument over what we are actually supposed to be talking about. Moving right along, we explore what sorts of things we find in an Urban Fantasy, and what sorts of rules these stories usually abide by.

Dan tells us how he set about writing the John Cleaver books, which certainly qualify as Urban Fantasy, Howard tackles the burning question of where one might start in the project of building a mythos, and Brandon explains
his own Urban Fantasy projects, including one failure from which we can all learn an important lesson.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Dresden Files Book One: Storm Front, by Jim Butcher, narrated by James Marsters.

Writing Prompt: . Give us an Urban Fantasy in which the point of origin for your crossover is big box store retail spaces which somehow breach the boundary between our world and the magical one.

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