• what if anne bernays pamela painter

    Onto the What If Book

    Since I’m waffling between pre-writing for two novels, it’s now time to move onto the What If? book. This is a book that I got in my creative writing class in college that I kept. It contains various writing exercises for writers that I intend to use for practice/pre-writing for Healing Mage Novel. Many years ago, I went through the book and did each exercise in the book — one per lunch hour — with just random exercises, nothing related to a book. But I marked the ones that were good/useful/weren’t boring, and I’ll be doing just those for this pre-writing. I’m probably doing too much pre-writing for these novels,…

  • ‘What If’ the book sucks?

    God this What If? book sucks. There are about 110 exercises in the book and most of them either don’t apply, need a group to work, are below what I’ve already learned, or are just gay. First the book is for college students who want to workshop stories. Workshopping’s discouraged by most authors in the first place, and I don’t want to workshop anyway. What I want is tips and tricks on how to make stories better or create ideas for stories. It keeps citing works that I’ve never read and don’t want to read, and they keep thinking I should emulate these people. It thinks I should be like…

  • Just When I Think I’m Out…

    Cracked open my “What If?” book for the first time in… oh, months and months. I’ve reached a bit of a wall with Galerians, and either I can start coagulating my ideas or try and make more of them. I chose the latter because I’m uncomfortable with some gaps in the plot and loose characters with no flesh or not enough motivation. I was trying to get through the book in order, and unfortunately, the chapter I’m in right now is “Revising and Rewriting”. This is a problem because most of that applies to Blood 2. Man, it seems the more I try to forget about that story, the more…