Leveling Up in Writing

scott pilgrim level up

There are quite a few ways that video games are better than real life. For one, there are very few consequences for your actions. Want to eat mushrooms? Snack away, Mr. Plumber. Want to try to defeat the world’s most evil wizard with a bunch of Deku nuts? Have at it, Hero of Time! Pretty much anything goes.

But one of the things I really love about video games happens to come from role-playing games in particular — the idea of leveling up. Continue reading →

Race Days and Writing Days

If you’ll notice the tumbleweeds around these parts, that’s because I’ve spent the last few weeks immersed in The Jimmy Project, my alternate history superhero story about a boy and his feelings. And saving the U.S of A., I guess.

I finished The Jimmy Project last weekend, and now I’m in a bit of the afterglow that accompanies the end of a first draft. Leaning back and knowing you’re done with that challenging draft is one of the most rewarding things you can imagine. It’s not just that you had an idea, because ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s that you took that one idea persevered when you worried that it might be a bad one. That you kept pushing even when it seemed foolish to do it. And somewhere along the line, you wrote a book. Oops. Continue reading →

Smashing Trains: Storytelling as Problem Solving

I always hated math. Locking two numbers together in Gladiator-style mortal combat made no sense to me. Who cares about the victor of that bloody conflict, when there are so many cool things that could be happening in outer space, and slightly less cool things (but just as bloody as number Hunger Games) that have already happened on this world? Other subjects were far more interesting to me.

But the one small bit of math that I did enjoy happened to be applied mathematics. You know, making numbers do things that matter in the real world. Two trains leaving different stations and careening toward one another at a breakneck speed was fun, get your popcorn ready type stuff waiting to happen. Continue reading →

The Booket List: March 2013

March was a bit of a slow month for me in terms of reading. I did manage to read three books, and while that’s nice, it puts me short of my goal of reading one book per week. I blame that on the book I’m writing, partially, but also because March was a crazy month in general. Oh, and the fact that I’ve been reading tons of Calvin and Hobbes. Hopefully I’ll do better in April.

Here’s March’s Booket List: Continue reading →

The Fat Princess

Girl of Fire and Thorns

Sometimes I’m a fat princess. No, I’m not having an identity crisis, I’m just identifying with the excellently realized character in THE GIRL OF FIRE and THORNS by Rae Carson, one of the most recent books I’ve read. The book follows the exploits of Elisa, a powerless, overweight, self-conscious princess that happens to have been identified as God’s Chosen One at birth — and never quite feels like she matches up to the mark of the Godstone that rests in her navel. Continue reading →

On Hero Worship and Hard Work

It’s always nice when someone you admire says something positive about a thing you did.

If you aren’t aware, some time ago my friends and I made a video called Day in the Life of a Turret, which sort of went viral. A few years back, I stumbled across a blog post by one of my author idols, Lev Grossman, who wrote The Magicians books and used to be a writer for TIME Magazine, where he called Day in the Life of a Turret “genius.” Naturally, geeking out happened on my end. Continue reading →

Rewriting History and Adding Superkids

WW2 Captain America

The most interesting part of writing The Jimmy Project, my current novel about a superkid raised by the U.S. government, is that it takes place in an alternate Earth, with a history different from our own. For other things I’ve written, I’ve only had to do a modicum of research, just some brief Wikipedia browsing to make sure I wasn’t completely off my rocker before tackling a few sections. TJP has been wildly different in that I’m writing about a time period I have zero firsthand knowledge of (the 1930s-1950s), besides a few World War II movies. Continue reading →

Your Thing Is Good and You Should Feel Good

First drafts are hard.

No, seriously. We pay lip-service to the idea of writing being a finicky, petty and blood-sucking monster, but for real, it can be a killer to try to start a new book. No matter how confident you feel about where you are as a writer, or as an anything, first attempts tend to rough us up, WWE style, with about as many theatrics to boot.

As much as I tell myself that it’s fine to let a first draft be crappy, and as much as I tell myself that I need to wait to revise, the urge to tweak is so strong I send myself into obsessive fits.

I doubt I’m the only one. Continue reading →

Formative Felines: On Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes Complete Collection

As of this weekend, I’m the proud owner of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes Collection. something that fills me with an embarrassing amount of joy. Don’t get me wrong: I probably have the majority of these books in separate places between my house and my old bedroom at home, but they’ve become so worn down from years of re-reading that I thought it would be nice to own them again, on the real.

Part of the reason I wanted to own the collection (besides the fact that I want to read every strip again), is that I want my daughter to grow up with Calvin and Hobbes the way I did. Continue reading →

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