Your local zombie author appears on Writing Excuses, Plus the Writing Debrief explained

After a cancerous death, I appeared on Writing Excuses this week to groan and hold forth with the guys on writing second novels and second books in a series. During the podcast I talked about my practice of debriefing after every writing project. A reader just asked what that was, and so I thought I’d explain it

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John guests on Writing Excuses season 3 episode 19

Here’s the third episode I recorded with the Writing Excuses guys. In the first podcast we talked about putting and not putting ourselves in our writing and making characters who don’t all sound like the author. In the second, we talked about how to not repeat yourself as an author. In this one, I shared some basics

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John guests on Writing Excuses season 3 episode 18

Here’s the second episode I recorded with the Writing Excuses guys. In the first podcast we talked about putting and not putting ourselves in our writing and making characters who don’t all sound like the author. In this one, we talked about how to not repeat ourselves in ways that make the reader feel like they’re getting the

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John guests on Writing Excuses season 3 episode 16

A while ago the Writing Excuses team asked me to record with them, and last Friday I got to do it and had a blast. We recorded three episodes. In the first podcast we talk about putting and not putting ourselves in our writing and making characters who don’t all sound like the author. As usual,

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World-building the history of a place

The Writing Excuses guys have posted another good podcast: this one on world-building a history. I wanted to add a few comments. You’ll notice that a lot of the blurbs for my novel mention my world-building, so I guess it’s a strength in my writing. However, I don’t write huge world building documents in the pre-draft

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