Blog Posts

30

• 21 weeks

  Creating Compelling Characters

  Creating a ‘good’ character is an evergreen topic in many groups on this site, so I thought it might be worth a shot to dedicate another miniguide to it. Here I’ll focus primarily on some aspects of a character’s role in a story and the ways in which these aspects affect character creation. The guide might be also a bit messier than usual as putting together these various tidbits of advice would require a far longer text to be somewhat coherently connected.

  Read More

  7 comments · 123 views

• 28 weeks

  Handling Points of View with Grace

  I’m pretty sure that all of you have read more than one story in your life, and I’d bet that most of you noticed that stories can be told from a variety of perspectives. If you prefer a somewhat fancier term, such a perspective can be also called a point of view (POV for short). Types of POVs, their usage, and common pitfalls are what’s this miniguide going to be about. Just like in case of the guides previously published here (and archived in my blogs), this is meant primarily for beginners

  Read More

  10 comments · 189 views

• 41 weeks

  Story Titles, Cover Art, and Descriptions 101

  Imagine this: You wrote a story that you deem great. You may have even shown it to a few folks for beta-reading and might have it edited, so the fact the story ain’t bad is most likely not just your subjective perception. Then you publish the story. Nothing happens. No comments, a modicum of votes, and a few views. Maybe it’s just bad luck. Or maybe the story’s boring and fails to maintain the audience’s attention—however, if you had a bunch of good beta-readers helping with the story, this

  Read More

  10 comments · 187 views

• 43 weeks

  COVID, Floods, Slugs, and Other Joys

  It’s been three months since my last status report, and I feel it’s time for another one. Things definitely haven’t played out as I anticipated them to. For one, I hoped I’d finally get enough free time to make significant headway on all of my pony and non-pony projects. Well, nope.

  Read More

  6 comments · 170 views

• 51 weeks

  How to (Not) Write Story Beginnings

  So you have a story with a good description, fitting cover art, original title, and an appealing premise, yet it seems that the views and votes are not coming in as fast as you‘d like? There might be many reasons behind your lack of success, including, but not limited to, bad luck and bad timing, the title, description and so on not being as perfect as you think, and, lastly, the story itself not being as good as you advertised it to be.

  Read More

  10 comments · 216 views