Please be respectful of others and keep all responses at most, pg-13. Agree or disagree, but just be nice to each other.
WordPress Conversion
I hope that the time spent on the WordPress Conversion was worth it. The intention was to speed up the site for mobile usage since desktops seemed to handle the old site fine. It was not fun.
Leave your comments here to let me know about your experience regarding the speed of the site.
Thanks,
James Stoakes
What Brought You Here?
Dialog
Recently, a friend asked how I come up with conversational dialog between multiple characters in my stories. At first, I answered, “Simple, I have a whole bunch of voices rolling around in my head,” but then I thought about it a bit and wondered how the voices came alive. What I found was that most of my characters come from a montage of personalities I have met over time.
Some characters I have created have roots with someone I have met before. Others aggregated from two or more people’s personalities, with the more dominant traits usually taking over.
I can hear dead people. Well, not really, though, the persona of one of my close friends remains with me a decade after his death. His dark humor and sardonic nature permeate many of the stronger characters in my stories, but I digress.
My conclusion, after considering what I have written was, that most of my characters do have a base in reality. I draw upon the personalities of people I know or have met to create the voices in my head that make their way to paper.
Writer’s Block
Writer’s block sucks. There’s no easy way to say it. It’s frustrating, discouraging and it makes you feel like you have wasted tons of time. I get it occasionally now, but I used to get it all the time.
My first book took over fourteen months to write, which felt like forever ago now. When I experienced a mental block that would not allow me to write, I would go for a walk or sit and watch people at the park. Sometimes a movie would help me relax, and the creative juices would begin to flow again. Everyone’s solution to curing writer’s block is going to be different. Today, I go out of my way to avoid writer’s block, and this is what I have done to prevent it.
The first thing I did was to set a soft goal. What I mean by a soft goal was one that was possible to make, even exceed, but not one that I would punish myself for not making. I set my goal at 1000 words a night; I write after work until bedtime. To some of you that will sound lofty, to others, it will seem like too little, for me it was just right. The actual goal is not as important as having one, and you can adjust it if necessary. The important thing is to establish a habit that spurs you to write every day. For me, having a routine like this helps me keep moving forward, it encourages me to take action.
Every word counts. If I cannot move forward on my story line, I can write in my outline and refine some ideas in it in advance. If that doesn’t grab my interest and pull me in, then I can write more on another story or its outline until I feel more creative on my main story line. Do not be afraid to let your mind wander and change tasks. Again, every word counts, and the more you practice, the easier it gets to overcome or ignore writer’s block.
This blog post, for instance, is 360 words. These count towards my goal even though I far exceeded it today.
Villainy Chat
Starting this post to provide a place for people to leave feedback or ask questions about Villainy.
Power Chat
Feel free to post questions related to Power Series here.
Shades of Darkness Chat
Feel free to post questions related to Shades of Darkness here.
Vampires
What do you recall about vampires, and where did you learn it? What abilities do you remember them having? I seem to remember that they could charm people and turn to mist or fly away as a bat. What I do not remember is, how does one become a vampire? Is a bite all it takes, or is there more to it?
Description
I am in the habit of providing little information about characters physical attributes unless they are relevant to the story line. My thought is that how the character acts or what they say, causes the reader’s mind to draw upon their experience, and fill in the blanks. My beta readers had entirely different descriptions of a few characters when asked what they looked like, but they did not seem to miss the lack of detail.
What do you think?
Action
Describing a battle can be very difficult in a book. I usually try to detail the action from different perspectives through different character’s eyes. As a reader, do you prefer a third-person point of view, narrator, or first-person point of view such as through the character’s eyes?