Blog

The numbers I don't control

I don't need this to pay for anything. People are curious about it, and it changes almost nothing about the work. Would I like to have more income? Of course. I've worked my entire life and been modestly successful. I've been ready for opportunity when it knocked, but I realized …

The Worldbuilding Template: Sketch a World in 10 Minutes, Then Dig

Worldbuilding is where a lot of us either freeze or drown. We freeze because a blank "describe your world" page gives us nowhere to start. We drown because once we do start, there's no bottom, and you can spend a year on tax law for a country that never appears on the page. The S…

The Studio, 2 months later

In July I opened the Studio at charlieforet.com/studio and introduced it with a promise of one post per tool. The Character Template came next. Then the series stopped. Or it might have looked that way. Since then I've written the Workshop posts, on how and why I built my own pla…

The Hero's Journey as Scaffolding

The hero's journey is scaffolding you build with, then take down The hero's journey is a circle with seventeen stations on it. Ordinary world at the top, then the call, the refusal, the mentor, the threshold, all the way around. You've seen the diagram. I've leaned on that circle…

The New Character Template

The Character Template: Build a Character You Can Come Back To Every writer has a graveyard of half-finished character sheets. Mine used to live in Word documents named things like char_notes_FINAL_v3.docx. The template was fine. The problem was everything around it: no consisten…

The Writing Resources Page

I keep my working craft notes on one page of this site. It's called Writing Resources, and reaching it costs nothing but a free account. I mean the actual notes. The template I fill in before I name a character. The ten-part slog I went through to build a believable world for my …

Finn and Elara: Exploring Boundaries in a New Realm

Editing, Editing, Editing…when do I get back to writing? I am happy to say I’ve finished my editing and re-write of sections of A New Past to create a less explicit version of the story. I’m not getting the final formatting sorted out and posted on Amazon for publishing. It’s bee…

Oxford Comma vs. No Oxford Comma: What Writers Should Know

Which is the best for comma usage in fiction? To be, or not to be?  As I’ve been revising and editing Another Past: Book One, I’ve run into an inconsistency in my editing tools. In the review tools built into Ulysses, where my definitive content lives, Oxford commas are used. Thi…

Secrets, Surveillance, and Survival in Technomancer

An excerpt from Technomancer. “Elara!” Finn called out sharply as he watched one of the feeds from the neighborhood spy-cams he had set up. The three-person team in cheap business suits were too well organized to be random pollsters. He watched as they stopped people on the stree…

Overcoming Writing Blocks: Tips to Reignite Your Muse

I’ve hit a little block on my two works-in-progress. Neither is fully blocked, in so far that I know where I want the story to go, but both are feeling more like work to write at the moment. Since the first 25k words in each came almost effortlessly, it gives a pause when it star…

Understanding Character Depth Through the Lens of Who

I recently started to get caught up on Writing Excuses, Season 20 while commenting into work. Specifically, Episode 5: Lens 1 - Who. The discussion introduces “the lens of who” — which means talking about characters. This is a great refresher on making characters that are multi-d…

Crafting a Compelling Book Summary

Summarizing a novel always feels tough for me. Maybe I'm too close to the content and want too many details in the summary. Maybe I don't know what really engages potential readers to attract their interest. Now that I've finished polishing my first draft of Technomancer, I need …