Hartmouth Horrors

This Monday morning, my mind is on the fact that someone just subjected one of my books to over two hours of less than complimentary video analysis, as well as covering it in some blood-like fluid and driving a knife through it to create a thumbnail image. And rather than piss and moan about this—which, trust me, I’d really love to do, being as big a crybaby as the next man—I’ve decided this is a good time to renew my commitment to being a positive presence in the indie writing space. Yes, I’m primarily here for myself, to promote my own writing, so this isn’t some heroic declaration. But I don’t think that’s incompatible with putting my best foot forward along the way. After all, a love of telling stories and a desire to build an audience for them is ultimately about looking for connection, at least in my own case. If I can find others who love what I love and get what I get, that’s pretty much job done, right? The sales, the relative popularity, are simply a byproduct of that. So the...

This Monday morning, my mind is not at all on this blog, since I’ve just started the next draft of Drudge and am already consumed by it. So, rather than half-assedly flap my gums about some writing-adjacent issue or other, I’m going to whole-assedly, and hurriedly, flap my gums about how much I love what I’m doing. After a month of not peeking (much) at my first draft, and having already incorporated the large-scale changes suggested by alpha readers, I can now begin to sprinkle in those creative flourishes, cut out any repetitious words and phrasings, finesse the prose for accuracy and flow, and generally whip the manuscript into shape. At a pace of around 2,500 words a day, and being that Drudge is a fairly short novella, this means I should have a draft ready for beta readers by next Sunday afternoon. And by that point, the last of the heavy lifting will be done and I can turn my mind to other bits and pieces, such as tweaking the blurb and the cover art. So yeah, that’s it. Seven...

This Monday morning, my mind is on a tweet I read about modern readers passing over quality prose for something simpler, or words to that effect. By asking the OP, I was able to narrow down ‘simple prose’ to that which takes little or no effort to read (sounds pretty good to me, not gonna lie), and this got me thinking about something dear to my heart, namely text readability. For a bit of context, I started writing in my early twenties, and I really wasn’t very good at all. Not only did I not have much to write about—something that’s improved after a long hiatus—but my prose was heavily on the purple side. That was, until I attended a short talk on text readability, which was a real game changer for me. Turns out I was making two main errors that were leading to chewy, hard-to-digest prose. One, far too many words with high syllable counts. One or two of these bad boys here and there doesn’t make for much of an issue, but stack them up and the cognitive load on your readers really doe...

This Monday morning, my mind is on elegant variation, a term coined in the early 1900s to describe the using of synonyms and substitutional phrases to avoid repetition in prose. Taken with a pinch of salt, it’s not such a bad idea, but taken to the nth degree, it can produce some pretty hilarious results. And unfortunately, it seems to crop up a little too often in indie writing. Let’s take a moment first to consider the writerly avoidance of repetition. I don’t know exactly why we do this — and if there are solid, well-researched answers out there, I’m too idle to look for them—but it appears that we do, at least in the Anglophone world. When I notice recurring terms in quick succession in my own writing, I find myself cringing and doing what I can to remedy the situation, and I strongly suspect that you do too. So, accepting that repetition is something we want to avoid, what’s to be done about it? Well, I never envisioned this weekly blog as a writers’ advice thing, so I’m not about...