Tag: diary

Writer’s Diary: Dialogue

This week’s theme was dialogue. I wrote 5,500+ words for my three stories this week and in each I worked on trying to create dramatic and captivating dialogue. I think I had varying degrees of success overall. I would like to have some more feedback for my writing, however, I have no idea how to promote my writing blog. While I have about 20+ followers I don’t know how many actually follow any of my stories. I have gotten many likes this week and that’s certainly encouraging, but it’s hard to translate likes into constructive feedback. If anyone has any advice on how to attract people who might be interested in reading my stories please let me know in a comment. For now I just want to reflect on the three sections of dialogue I wrote this week.

The first of these was The Monk and this contained the worst dialogue of the three in my opinion. Not for the content, indeed I have actually won some praise for the content, and I am pleased with that myself. Rather what I was unhappy about with this dialogue was the simplicity of style, it was just questions and answers. It had the sophistication of a public school homework assignment. There was little passion in the dialogue, although I tried to put a feeling of solemnity in it to try and spice it up emotionally. What I would like to do in future Monk updates is have more arguments, debates, and emotive speeches. I don’t like the low energy nature of these dialogues. Continue reading “Writer’s Diary: Dialogue”

Writer’s Diary: Market Facing Author

The age of the Internet has done something to writing that hasn’t been the case ever before in history. In the past writers were extremely limited in their ability to reach an audience. If I had to use clay or stone tablets to reach my audiences then I would need to spend most of my time learning the art of making these tablets and only a fraction of my time on actual writing. Even with paper and the printing press it was still difficult to spread ideas. There have always been gatekeepers preventing writers from sharing their creativity and they’ve mostly been economic: the availability of clay was the gate keeper for the author of clay tables, the availability of parchment the gate keeper for the dark age author, and so on. When the printing press came along it was the publishing company that was the gate keeper. Do you want your writing published? Then it needs to find a publisher who will approve it for you first. With the internet though, this has all changed. For less than a day’s salary you can buy a domain name and publish your own work and it can potentially reach everyone who can read.

However, how am I to earn a living being an author? Patreon is exciting to me because in the past artists needed to either have plenty of money themselves or they needed to have a wealthy patron to fund their creativity. The idea that hundreds of people could each chip in a few dollars for me each month and that I might be able to actually make something of a living from my hobby is quite exciting. Of course, I haven’t actually made any money from this yet and probably won’t for a long time. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained as the saying goes. I enjoy writing and it is meaningful for me to share my work. Now that I have this site, and I’ve decided how I will run it, all I need focus on now is producing good quality writing. Writing that people will actually want to read. Writing that people will think, “it was worth my money supporting that guy!” So what can I do to be in control of this? How can I make this site a success now that I am a market facing writer, not a publisher facing writer, because the only gatekeeper left is the reader. Well, I have a few goals at the moment for improving my writing: Continue reading “Writer’s Diary: Market Facing Author”

Writer’s Diary: Patreon & Fresh Starts

This has been a busy couple of weeks for me, both on this site and off. I have been working full time during the days but also busy on this writing blog in the evenings. I have created several new pages for this site to make it more navigable and added them to the top menu and the side menu for everyone’s ease. Be sure to check out the schedule page – I will from now on be publishing to this schedule as best as possible. The most important update will be my Saturday updates as these will be the updates that I charge to Patreon for – none of my other updates will be charged to Patreon should you wish to support my writing. If you would like to support my writing by throwing a few coins my way to stimulate me to work harder please visit my Patreon and sign up as one of my patrons. There will be rewards of sneak previews and extra content for those who support me on Patreon.

Another challenge I had this week was the dilemma of trying to repair the damage I had done to The Monk and Humhyde by writing them under a time pressure. In both cases I was writing them very late at night and quickly just to get a publication out each day. I have abandoned this approach and decided that in the future I will allocate time specifically for my writing during the day so as to make sure that I produce quality writing consistently. Also, I have limited my weekday installments to just 1,000 words each – although my Saturday updates will be 2,500 words long. The purpose of these word limits on my posts and scheduled releases is so that I can write ahead several weeks in advance. This will reduce the pressure on me to publish material that isn’t polished enough to share. If I get enough Patrons I will increase the amount of material I post, but I still need to find out if anyone likes my writing enough to be my Patron. Continue reading “Writer’s Diary: Patreon & Fresh Starts”

Writer’s Diary: Reforms

Lately, I have been working long hours and pushing myself to keep up my writing schedule despite my tiredness. The result has been that I find the quality of my writing has dropped significantly in two of my recent posts. I will go back and fix these pieces up so they’re up to the standard I feel comfortable publishing. When I first started this blog, I wanted to update it regularly, however, realistically it isn’t easy having a regular schedule of large updates. It would be much easier if I restrict my updates to a particular length. So starting next week, I have a new schedule.

The purpose of this is so that on the days when I am too busy or tired to write, I will always have something ready to publish. The posts will be shorter than they have been, but they will be consistent. Also, the quality shouldn’t suffer like it has recently with the rushed out pieces. Also, I am going to add my Patreon account to this page so if you would like to support my writing, please feel free to sign up. I will only charge my Patrons once a week on Saturday for the major update. All the other updates are free. Continue reading “Writer’s Diary: Reforms”

Writer’s Diary: Space Fall

Hello readers,

If you’re worried about missing out on part 5 of Spacefall, you may relax, I am working on it, and will probably put it up tomorrow.  I’m just taking a bit of a break today because the last two parts were 2,000 words each and part 5 is looking like it will be in the 3,000 word range.

Space fall is based on an idea I had one day while reading up about exo planets that astronomers have found in recent years.  I was particularly surprised to learn that water is a relatively abundant substance in the universe that is typically present during the formation of a new star system, but unless a planet has a strong electromagnetic field, like the Earth does, the water eventually gets blown off the surface of the planet and into space.  Water is so abundant that some exo planets have oceans on them possibly hundreds of kilometres deep.  Yet many planets are like Mars or the moon lack a strong electromagnetic field to prevent the water that used to be there from being stripped away by the sun’s radiation. Continue reading “Writer’s Diary: Space Fall”