November is fast approaching. And lots of stuff happens in November. Thanksgiving and election day are the noteworthy American events. (My fellow Americans, don't forget to vote!) But another event happens in November, one I'm sure some of you will recognize.

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In my editing career, I have met many authors who possessed...tenuous self-esteem about their work. My blunt critiquing style and frequent lack of tact have damaged many an author's self-esteem further. And I take full responsibility for that. I've often had a strained relationship with my own work as well. I recently did some editing for an IRL friend new to writing, and these topics came up multiple times in our discussion. I thought it a good thing to discuss.

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Before we get into today’s blog topic, I just want to quickly revisit some of the political stuff from my second-to-last blog post.

Bad news: there’s still feds running around kidnapping people. They've retreated from Portland, but are explicitly being sent to other cities.

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Last week, after many false starts and discards, I finished the first chapter of my novel. Or more accurately, I finished the first chapter of a novel after discarding three others this year, and this is the first one I'm mildly confident might possibly be finish-able. To celebrate this ephemeral milestone, I would like to revisit a piece of writing advice that I learned long ago, yet I still often forget; don’t force it—but don’t procrastinate either.

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Picture the following;

The world we know is actually a dream, and the world of dreams is secretly reality.

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Titles are one of the most important parts of any work, in any medium. Titles are the first impression your story gives. When someone recommends a new book or movie to a friend, the title is the only universal part. The title requires conciseness, but must also hint at a lot of ideas and information.

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One of the strange things about fanfiction is that its characters are premade. There is often no need to create original characters, because the show provides so many for authors to utilize. But all characters use the same building blocks. Writing a character in fanfiction is not that different from making characters of your own. For today’s post about writing, I’d like to discuss one of the fundamental building blocks of character: the archetype.

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Long-time followers of mine will notice I often make reference to original fiction I’ve been working on. The project in question has hip-hopped and changed numerous times, and my short attention span and work schedule are certainly contributing factors.

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Delete, cut, backspace, empty recycle bin. However it happens, deleting things is one of the most important and difficult parts of writing. Choosing to throw away a piece of work can often be like ripping off a band-aid, or in the worst cases, like putting down a pet. One of the most dangerous things an author can do is to never delete anything. This applies to everything from individual words to entire ideas and concepts.

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In the past, I’ve advocated learning from cinema, trying to use and translate the same techniques into prose. I use terms like “blocking” and “off-screen” to refer to things in prose.

Today, however, I’d like to discuss one of the major differences between visual media and prose. It also happens to be one of prose fiction's greatest weaknesses: scenes and stories with a large number of characters.

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Another year, another in my series of Idea Graveyard posts, where I discuss an idea of mine that failed to get off the ground for one reason or another. What made me discard the idea, and why haven’t I tried again. Today’s subject is different from my previous failures: its shortcomings are more narrow and simple, but in some ways that makes them harder to fix.

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My previous LDC post was about a very omnipresent cliché. Today, I’d like to discuss a similarly common, and no less frustrating trope; the phonetic accent.

What is it? The phonetic accent is when a writer attempts to spell a word how it sounds. There is (usually) no guidelines or reasoning to it, and it’s often far disconnected from normal spelling.

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Well, the collab I cobbled together is finally fully posted. I want to say thank you to everyone who participated; thanks not just for participating, for putting up with my blunt and occasionally obtuse criticisms, but also for sticking it through and finishing it. I never expected the response I got, and I think that, together, we made a story greater than a single author could have.

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So I recently finished playing Tales of Berseria. Like many games in its genre, it was a dense experience, both in terms of gameplay and story. This density has many expressions, but one that I noticed in particular was its use of invented terms and technobabble. Here’s a partial list of some of the world-specific terms it uses;

* Malevolence – Evil energy. Related to the next item.
* Demonblight – A disease that turns people into demons.

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Many moons ago, back when I was a bad worse writer, I posted a preliminary idea for a story. It was about a freshly-alicorned Twilight, and her struggle with learning a new type of magic. Celestia asks her to learn war magic; whereas combat magic deals with combat between individuals, war magic deals with conflicts between armies. If combat magic is the bow and arrow or the sword, then war magic is the

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Another new year is here. That means lots of new beginnings, looking forward, etc. All those platitudes and cliches we've come to know and possibly tolerate. But just as important as looking to the future, perhaps even more important, is examining the past. Learning from our mistakes and critiquing our own work is crucial if we want to grow as writers (and as people).

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Many moons ago, I saw all those Multi-story-spanning alternate universes rampant at the time. I thought to myself, “I could do that.” As the title of this blog series may hint, it never truly congealed into a good story, let alone multiple stories. For today’s idea graveyard, I’d like to share the meandering process with you all. After all, as John Dewey said, “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”

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Those who have read enough of my fics know that I like Dark fic. I find extrapolating from canon, making it more dramatic and dangerous, to be an interesting challenge.

Yet Dark fic is also one of the most commonly derided sub-genres of fanfic, because so many stories do it so badly. For today’s blog post, I’d like to discuss one of my favorite types of fanfiction: what separates the good from the bad, and how those ideas can be seen in other types of fiction as well.

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In a previous post, I invented a categorization system for fiction based on its intent. I created three broad categories—Propaganda, Entertainment, and Art—and attempted to explain what they were.

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I have often been told that dialogue is one of my strongest areas as a writer. I find this compliment a bit unusual, because dialogue is often one of the areas that I spend the least time on. My dialogue technique involves a lot of instinct and guess work (I suppose a lot of my writing does). There is one area, however, where I did have to learn and research, because I am quite bad at it in real life.

Lying.

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