K.Childs

Right now, I'm avoiding writing my novel.  I have been for a few days for a myriad of reasons- I've been suffering a horrific toothache that I couldn't address because I had no money, I've been depressed with the holiday blues because I had to spend what little money I had on drugs (prescriptions) to stay sane, which has left me in a precarious position for the next two weeks financially. Unwell, unhappy, worried about other things, I've spent the last four days focusing on escaping into something I don't have to build. But now the tooth is gone, and while I'm on a liquid diet, I feel so much better. However, I'm still procrastinating. Sometimes we fall off the 'write every day' bandwagon. Some weeks it's just not the right mood, the right words aren't on the tip of your tongue, the right phase of the celestial alignment. The secret during these times, is that it never will be. Life is a messy affair; you have to carve your own mood...

Cassandra Palmer series by Karen Chance. So my usual preamble about any series review; I dislike the time-travel trope in most media.  It is usually full of plot holes, inconsistencies and often characters making dumb decisions that they justify poorly. I want to like it, but authors use time-travel as a lazy device and leave dozens of plot hooks and conundrums hanging about my head days later. I like Doctor Who, but you can drive buses through the holes in the time-travel episodes’ plot. Essentially, I want to like time-travel, however movies and books with great popularity but ill-conceived finishes have ruined it for me. The stories without plot-holes usually end up as ‘looped time’ bubbles that finish and end with either the whole thing becoming final and never repeatable, or self-contained and ceasing to have meaning. There’s only so many times you can finish a book and think ‘so none of it mattered? No one lived, no one learned anything, nothing chan...

Fangs in the blood It was 2004 and my sister got the sixth or seventh book in a series she was rather fond of. At the time I had been devouring just about anything with vampires in it- I was going through ‘that’ phase so many of us go through and the urban fantasy/paranormal scene was just starting to slowly slide out of the shadows it had been hiding in for years. I’d finished Tanya Huff’s Blood Ties trilogy and was eager for more of this gritty dark and sexy vampire thing that was still a fresh new taste to my reading palate. So my sister said, ‘you might like this’ and slid Guilty Pleasures by Laurel K Hamilton across to me. I was a slow, slow reader in those days; getting through a book took about a week. I gorged myself on Guilty Pleasures in about two days (which was a record for me). I stayed up until dawn the night I read Circus of the Damned (the third book) and I can tell you with total honesty, I have read the first nine novels of the series at least 6...

Slouch Witch by Helen Harper So I found it in the top percent of amazon for paranormal reads and the blurb seemed quirky and sort of 'okay' for me to at least read the sample. First, the sample was a really nice slice of the start; it definitely had enough to hook and then reel me in. I put it down, broke and determined that I needed the money for food, not books. An hour later, my willpower broke under the oppressing need to read more. I mean, I read like I'd like to eat; picky about content, high-quality and five-star restaurants only (don't we all!) so finding something I /want/ is pretty solid. I finished it in a day. First of all, the writing is smooth, quirky, characterful and enchanting. The characters are likable, solid, detailed and breathe with life and effort. There's mystery, there's humor, there's danger, a rich world and right after finishing I wanted to delve straight into the second novel in the series. The story is self-conta...

So during November, inevitably there comes a time where I would rather do anything, anything at all, than write another word. If you've participated in the great conspiracy and secret that is NaNo, you know of what I speak. My muse alternates between a seductive adonis beckoning me to build him into yet another mind-blowing erotica and Major Payne. He's a sadistic Dom with a whip in my mind and a short attention span. During NaNo, it can be hard to keep him focused; or he's so focused that my fingers blur on the keyboard, my wrist begins to smart and small whimpers escape my lips. My Muse likes that. But taking a break here and there is needed (like, I have to shower and eat, you know,) and creative breaks are a necessity. I find that all the rage from my Muse can sometimes be chanelled into art, or in this case, photomanipulation. I got all the references for these two from DeviantArt. I've been playing a lot at getting better with  lighting and I felt ...

So one of my favourite rants by my spirit-animal Limyaael is all about creating magic systems that aren't over-done, boring or poorly explained and inevitably full of plot holes. Overdone Magic Systems If you are a big fantasy reader you know two forms of magic very well: The four elements; fire, wind, earth, water (and usually the protagonist will be Captain Planet while everyone else is stuck to their single element) White and Black; this one probably gets me the most. Black Magic is Evil magic and that's final. If you use it, you are Bad. I remember seeing an author making a world and she had about four schools of magic and one school that was 'black magic- evil and bad' with no reason or explanation as to what made this particular magic bad. It didn't draw on the souls of the innocent, it didn't do anything especially different to the other schools of magic she made; it was an arbitrary distinction.  I'm sure there are one or two more common sy...

The history of a Golden Beta: I've been occasionally offering my services to other authors as a beta since I was about 16. It is a good way to learn to read critically and helps to forge relationships among the literary types. When I was younger, I would focus on grammar, give brief overviews of what I liked and end it at that. Over the years I found that asking questions prompted authors to respond better and I developed a sort of questioning technique for when I found problems in writing to prompt an author to address the underlying reason for the questions. The right Betas. Beta reading has very little reward unless you are doing it for money- and a good beta should be reading genre that you are writing for predominantly. I learned the hard way that someone who isn't interested in urban fantasy doesn't have a lot to say about your werewolf murder mystery in Los Angels. Betas normally take on a novel that interests them and is in a genre they like. What not to...

I've been writing seriously since I was about 14. I'd discovered when I was 12 that I enjoyed it. As time went on, I realized that I couldn't live without it. Writing is a strange beast. You don't always know how much it becomes a part of you until you try to stop. That's what happened when I was 23. I went almost a whole year without writing. I didn't stop thinking about it, I didn't stop wanting it, I didn't stop needing it. Writing is in my bones. I spent years etching it there. I never went anywhere with it. All the worlds of authors and publishing were miles away while I was growing up. I was learning how to craft my voice. I was learning how to be a good author; not just a popular fanfiction writer. Honing the craft; refining that elusive self as an author. Until I could write a story that I liked; that was the image in my head, on paper. At 23, I felt that final veil pull aside. I found the etchings of my voice. I had been writing seriously ...

  Enthusiastic Review: Tamora Pierce’s The Lioness Quartet series. I'm starting my reviews today with an author whom I have followed for over 10 years. Because writing, especially good writing, stays with you. Before I begin, I should start with a caveat: I read these novels when I was sixteen originally and when I look back on them now, I find that what made me like them then still very much hold up as an adult. However, as well you might expect, I have the rose-tinted glasses of youthful adventure over these novels. Many folk who are now YA readers probably weren’t born before the age of ADSL internet and PDF downloads from Amazon. I was. In my day, I journeyed to bookstores and libraries for my meals of novel-oodles. We were hungry to find books on shelves; genres were restricted and rare and popular novels as a poor student with no income could take weeks to be available for check-out at the local library. Yes, these were dark times indeed for hungry r...

So I've spent last week in the hospital having my gall bladder removed and all the days in between so high on medication that I dreamed the entire first episode of a bad B grade TV show of a series of novels I can rant about for hours on end. What is the revision trap?   I've seen this picked up from a lot of different places, but I'll share the trap that I find myself most often falling into; a desire to publish chapter at a time for an audience but to ensure that each chapter is 'good enough' before throwing it out. This is probably most common from authors like me who learned their craft from fanfic and crowds of short reviews or quick 'update more!' expressions that make you rush a story at first and then bury yourself in a hole about halfway through. The revision trap for me, especially is a moment where after 20,000 words I stop and say 'I need to revise, adjust, change some things before I can continue on.' So the story, at this point, ...

Obviously these are all just my own, personal opinions. Write your novel your way. Take the advice that works for you. This is what works for me; what 15 years of experience has taught me. 1.1 Beginnings This is something of a two-birds and single rock for me. On the one hand, it is my first post on a fresh and shiny blog page that promotes me as an author, as a serious writer of genre fiction and, I just started the first precious words of a new novel. Beginning can be tough. Some of you, pantsers like me, might just rush at the sudden outpour of words onto paper and see where they take you. Others, the planners, need to know where they are starting, who with and why. These questions should still enter a pantsers mind; but I think we say ‘well let’s find out.’ And the novel shapes outward. But maybe you aren’t sure where to begin, or who with or why. This hits me sometimes. I’ve come up with some characters, a genre, a universe. I know scenes I want to get to, what h...