Okay, for my latest blog update, here's what I learned while visiting Oregon doing research for a book I'm writing...
For instance, if you've started a blog and find that you keep forgetting to add entries to it, don't give up!
No rest for the wicked! This year has been crazy so far, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Okay, so I borrowed that from Mark Twain, but that’s been my answer to the hundreds of folks (or was it a handful? I suck at numbers) who have been asking when I will post another blog entry.
What a convenient little item these would be. When watching the movie Signs, for instance, a viewer baffled by the fact that aliens who have mastered interstellar space travel are confounded by doorknobs need only don the Suspenders of Disbelief and Presto! It all makes perfect sense. Likewise, a Jean-Claude Van Damme fan watching Timecop for the hundredth time, wondering where on God’s Green Earth those “pods” disappear to when the Timecops make their jump would be immediately mollified by slipping on the trusty Suspenders of Disbelief.
FRED: “So Bill, as you know…” For the love of God, please don't ever begin a scene this way. Why on Earth is Fred telling Bill what Bill already knows? Because a writer is trying to get across some information to the viewer/reader and he/she’s taking the easy way out. Here’s another one: Fred and Bill are on a spec ops mission in the South American jungle. Fred says: “Remind me again why we're here?”
That's been my life in many ways but let's focus on just one for the time being: how I became a writer. I started at Blizzard as an artist. 2-D, then 3-D. During that time I edited game scripts and wrote dialogue and in time I became a voice director. For a few years I was writing boss lines and trailer VO for World of Warcraft, then auditioning actors for the parts and directing the voice sessions (I can't tell you how rewarding it is for a writer to cast folks who can speak your words so close to the way you hear them in your head).
Some authors would rather watch Manos: Hands of Fate repeatedly (without the Satellite of Love crew commentary) than write an outline. Here's my advice: if you're not on any kind of real schedule, and you do your best writing through exploration, go for it. Strike out into the great wide open of literary discovery and see where it takes you. If, however, you're working on an assignment with a deadline, or you're co-authoring a project (like I did with James Waugh on Curse of the Worgen), outline! It makes a lot more sense to map out your story up front and to identify road blocks when you're dealing with 10 pages or less than it does to just toss your map in the lake and wing it, even if you think you've got it all worked out in your head.