chrisschallertideaengine

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Advice While I'm on vacation, day 9

If you know how the story goes, that’s fine, but if you can’t imagine how your characters would react, don’t start writing. Outline it, imagine it, collect pieces for it, but don’t start writing it. Otherwise you will end up with a story that pulls your characters along, not a story. It will be so hard to write. Cheers.

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Advice While I'm on vacation, day 8

If you don’t love it, don’t push yourself on it. Actually, as love for a thing will often push you beyond yourself, don’t force yourself to love it. Don’t burn yourself out like that. Don’t make yourself miserable. It’s hard enough as it is. But oh, it’s so worth it. Cheers!

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Advice While I'm on vacation, day 7

Take a walk. Take a nap. Eat a salad. Talk with a friend. Watch the clouds. Put in your favorite music. Turn off the sound system. Listen to other conversations. Refresh yourself, physically and emotionally and spiritually. The race is long, and ultimately, it’s only against yourself. Cheers.

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Advice While I'm on vacation, day 6

With self-publishing, you don’t need all your elements together. You can throw together a 95% complete book draft, an AI book cover, and get a copy into the hands of your beta readers in two weeks. You can set the publication date for as far out as you want to get feedback. Then work with a human artist to get a real cover made, find your own typos, realize what you actually want the back cover…

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Advice While I'm on vacation, day 5

Turn the sentence around. Reverse the scene. Put the story events backwards. Put the other lyrics first. Give the other character the first word, or the last word. I’m still surprised how many of my stories don’t work simply because I first made them in the wrong order Hope this helps. Cheers!

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Advice While I'm on vacation, day 4

Study editing. I’ve read at least 4 books on the work of editing. I didn’t do it so I could become an editor, but so I could learn what editor do so I could do it myself to my stories in advance. It also helped me figure out “how to write it the easy it should sound.” It’s like when I got better at polishing injection moulds by doing repair jobs. Seeing how it’s done wrong helps you avoid doing…

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Advice While I'm on vacation, day 3

Try writing it as a script. I took a year to write a story as though it were a screenplay. I think it turned out well, and it helped me pare down my writing to the essential elements. It helped me learn focus. Cheers!

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Advice while I'm on vacation, day 2

Read. Don’t read what people obligate you to read, but read things that make you revel in the power of the written word. Inspire yourself. Cheers!

[chrisschallertideaengine]

I'm on vacation, Day 1

Keep practicing. Even when you know what you’re doing, keep practicing. Cheers!

[chrisschallertideaengine]

How to Make Dialogue Scenes Interesting. Like, Interesting at All.

I’ve had to wrestle with this for a bit. Not just in my own writing, but with a play I’m writing, with DND, and weirdly with conversations in general.  So when I came across this as a question in a group, I had an answer.  The answer is, stakes.  By any point in the story, you should be interested in the characters you are writing. You’ve seen them feed dogs, sneer at the Uber driver, toss…

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Teaser for "The Heavy Breather"

Nothing says “Egypt” like raiding ancient tombs for treasure. And that’s what the core of the story is. Guys need specific treasure, so they go to an ancient tomb guarded by (supposedly) a curse. So, what kind of curse? And what kind of tomb? And remember, this is a type of steampunk ancient world. So the kind of tomb… and the kind of curse… ? (pours a mug of mead)

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Crowville: the Collector and the Elder

That’s my story collection coming out this Christmas. Like I said yesterday, I had more short stories than I thought I did. Goes to show you that time spent on the craft is never wasted. Crowville is actually an interesting concept that’s been in my head for a few years. It came because there’s a spot, a blip on the road, called “Kroghville” near where I used to live, and I always imagined it…

[chrisschallertideaengine]

I've Got More Stories...

Until I started putting together some files for a collection of short horror/paranormal stories, I didn’t realize how much material I actually have. I mean… oof. I may have enough, actually, for several releases, if I split it up right. See, I’ve written for years without thinking about making money from it. Pure, adulterated productivity. Sheer output. And now it pays off. (pours a scotch…

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Draft, and My Education

Of all skills learned in school, I hardly expected homework to be the one that most attunes me to doing drafts my my stories. Writing “Research” Papers The days and days of sitting on my bedroom floor, surrounded by books with little tags on the pages, flitting from one to another, looking for where that one person said that one thing so that I could quote them as though they had done anything…

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Publication Checklist, version 1

Sure, there’s a lot of blogs and books, but here’s the short checklist for the fast and lazy writer who just wants to get back to work. Note: this is for KDP self-publishing. Format. I downloaded the whole set of book-size files, and while it’s a lot of “lorem ipsum” to replace, it’s easy. Takes me about one minute per chapter, copy-pasting and checking my paragraphs. Sub-hint: turn on the…

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Sorry, been busy...

Getting a book printed. Cooking. Talking with my father about screenplays. Getting yelled at for being easier to talk to and work with than my boss. Sleeping. Playing GameBoardArena. Mostly the book. Life goes on. Cheers!

[chrisschallertideaengine]

Villainizing Heroes

In line with my post about the soap-opera-esque levels of sleeping around in comics these days, I had another thought. And again, this is only based on the clips that the internet decides I need to see. (considering that I am subscribed to precisely zero comic pages, I’m guessing that I’m just caught in a broad algorithmic net with the rest of my demographic, but boy does that mean the algorithm…