Now that Prime is pretty much in Stan’s hands, it’s time to focus on a new book! Of course by ‘focus’ I mean sporadically write a new book while editing a few others and working on a query letter for Prime, but whatever. I actually started the new book a few weeks ago, but only now do I feel like I can focus on it, also by now I know I am past the hump of whether or not it will get finished (Sorry Demon Summer, you weren’t doing it for me).

So perhaps there will be a peek at the new book on Textnovel soon, but for right now I’m not ready to share it with the world. As for plot? Let’s say there is an evil queen, a brave young hero, and maybe just the hint of a love story.

That is pretty much the story with Prime now. After receiving Stan’s advice on the book, I leaped right back into editing it for what felt like the 312th time. Thank God he didn’t have too much he wanted done. When I go back months or years later to read a book I wrote, I am excited, sometimes I don’t even remember exactly what happened. Usually I am surprised by how good I think it is. But when I am reading it over and over again, I start to hate it. I think Stephen King promised me that would happen in his book “On Writing”, but it totally sucks when it happens.

Almost done with the editing though, at least for this round. Next I will be tackling my greatest foe, the Query letter, a tool originally invented by Satan.

Characters are the most important part of any book.  You can write beautiful descriptions, but if your characters don’t pull people in, most people will stop reading.  The hardest part when writing is to make your characters do what they would do in a situation, not what you would do.

The best way I have found to make sure this happens is to just back off.  I start writing a character and soon it is like the character is telling me exactly what they would do.  Sometimes they do things that are surprising and so very perfect that you think to yourself “How did I not see that coming?” To me, that is when I know that I am building a good character, because they are surprising me.

Thanks so much to the folks over at Sci-Fi Saturday night for having me on their show.  I had a ton of fun chatting with them about this week’s Sci-fi news, as well as my recent Textnovel win.  Anyone who missed the interview can catch it here: http://www.scifisaturdaynight.com/?p=2102