Tag: writing

A Day Off

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

Those of you who know me or have been following this blog for a while know that I rarely take a day off. I write, blog, or otherwise work on author stuff both before and after my day job. I don’t generally take weekends off either. In honor of Labor Day I have decided to take a weekend off from putting out a standard, full-length blog post.

Those of you who follow me on social media may have heard that I was working on a couple of potential posts for today, one of which was tentatively titled A Small Dark Stone. That flash fiction has turned into a longer story. I may post it here at a later date, but for now it’s still a work in progress.

In the meantime, check out some of my other writing. Middle Finger to the World  is a cyberpunk reflection on the trajectory of a broken life, and Interference is the first chapter of a longer future noir story currently under construction. It will feature sentient androids, human biases, and a freelance IT specialist caught up in a dark and gritty murder mystery. More flash fiction can be found under A Taste of Things to Come.

If you’re interested in checking out some of my longer work, Necrotic City  is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other fine booksellers. Most recently it has been hailed as “Robocop meets Dante’s Inferno,” and you can read the full review here.

Hel’s Fury  is a short story about love and injustice in a grim future Alaska where technology has advanced, but human rights are still stuck in the 1950s. It’s featured in the charity collection Trumpland: An Alternative History of the Future.

Be good to each other. Standard posts will resume next weekend.

Writing From A State of Exhaustion

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

Writing from a state of exhaustion

As a night owl and someone who typically requires nine hours of sleep, I’m well acquainted with exhaustion. It’s been a constant companion for most of my life.

In addition, exhaustion and depression go hand in hand for me. Exhaustion sucks the light out of life. The world becomes a grey, flat place where I can’t remember being happy. The future is a grey landscape, dull and pointless, stretching on without end. I can’t imagine enjoying anything, and I can’t imagine that changing.

You might scoff and assume that this is laughably easy to cure. In my case, you’d be wrong.

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Antagonistic Forces

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

Let’s talk believable antagonists and realistic sources of conflict.

I’m not going to get into the four types of conflict, or six, or however many it is now. I am going to talk about creating a believable antagonistic force, rather than one of those cardboard caricature, source-of-all-evil bad guys.

The concept of a having one person be the source of all of a story’s conflict has always seemed overly simple to me. Either the antagonist has help, or the protagonist’s problems are going to be disappointingly simple to solve. A lone enemy, unaided, is easy to overcome.

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Motivation vs Guilt

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

You should be writing. No. Seriously.

I see a lot of motivational posters aimed at authors. You know the ones: a movie character pointing out that you should be writing. Or maybe it’s a pop culture icon. Or maybe the message is framed as a comic strip. Or maybe it’s just a blank page with the words “You should be writing!” emblazoned across it.

And while some are fairly benign, many seem designed to guilt the viewer. I don’t know about you, but I write to feel free of my daily obligations. Writing is my own world, a world free of deadlines and restrictions. The concept of feeling guilty because I haven’t put enough words on paper lately is anathema to the whole reason I write.

Why is it that we, as authors and as a society, conflate guilt with motivation?

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Throttling the Flood of Conflicting Advice

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

Flood waters and sign

Some time back, a friend posted in a group we both frequent. She was frustrated with the flood of conflicting marketing advice for authors, and listed some of the contradictory advice she’d heard.

  1. Socialize with non-writers on Facebook. Don’t try to sell. Make friends.
  2. Advertise on Facebook.
  3. Advertise on Amazon.
  4. Forget Facebook and Amazon. Focus on Goodreads instead.
  5. Forget Goodreads. LibraryThing is the place to be.
  6. Advertise on other sites.
  7. Give away books on Net Galley.
  8. Don’t give away books for free. It invites pirates!
  9. Give away one book to entice readers.
  10. List with genre sites.
  11. Concentrate on Twitter.
  12. Forget promotion. Sign up with KU.

While I can’t stem the flood of contradictory and often counter-intuitive advice, I can offer my experiences. I spent a lot of time sorting through a veritable avalanche of marketing advice to come up with my strategy. These are my answers, backed up with research and personal experience.

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Tackling More Questionable Writing Advice

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

Quote from Sam Sykes on Twitter

I stumbled across this tweet the other day and found myself wondering, why shouldn’t I sneer at books that soared to popularity by appealing to the lowest common denominator? Why would I care what makes them tick?

If you’re the kind of author who doesn’t care about the quality of their work nearly as much as becoming famous, you may be thinking “I agree with this tweet! What’s the magic formula that makes inexplicably popular books so successful? And how can I apply it to my own writing?!” In that case, here’s the breakdown.

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The Passing of a Legendary Author

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

It was with great sadness that I learned of the passing of Ursula K. Le Guin, one of science fiction’s most influential authors. I grew up reading her work, and her death hit particularly close to home.

My first taste of her fiction was the novelette Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight. In it, a lost child tumbles into the world of Southwestern US desert folklore and lives for a while with the trickster Coyote. As a young person fighting to survive in a disturbing, chaotic world, the tale really resonated with me.

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On Questionable Writing Advice

Posted on by Leland Lydecker

There’s a never-ending flood of writing advice out there for aspiring authors. Some of the best I’ve heard is also the simplest and the most universal, like this bit from Stephen King’s On Writing:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

On the flip side, there’s tons of advice aspiring authors could probably do without. Today I’m here to tackle the misconceptions and one-size-fits-all solutions, and explain why they really aren’t helpful.

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