Dan Wells's Blog, page 22

Media Dan has Consumed: part n+1

I lose track of which part I'm supposed to be on in this series.

Most of today's books were consumed in the form of ebooks, which I read on my iPad, and which I ended up loving way more than I expected. I use Stanza as my e-reader, because it's simple and turns the pages quickly—no fancy paper animations or sound effects or whatever, just words and words and words. I use the "night" settings, even during the day, which is white text on a black background, which I find causes little or no eye f...

Life after Tragedy

This weekend was the anniversary of 9/11 and the terrorist attacks on the world trade center, which of course means that I'm going to talk about Battlestar Galactica. Stay with me here.

Last week I rewatched the miniseries of the new, re-imagined series, and then, because I'm a huge geek, I watched the entire thing AGAIN with the commentary track. The commenters, in this case, were the three creators of the show—the writer, the producer, and the director—and their comments were incredibly...

Back to work

DragonCon was fun, and pretty effective business-wise too, but now I'm home and it's time to get back to work.

I haven't done a ton of writing over the last few weeks, since I was in kind of a holding pattern regarding a couple of big projects. Over the past week both of those projects have been decided, and finally knowing what I'm doing has given me a surge of energy. My current work plans are as follows:

1) I need to finish The Mountain of the Lord. I'm very close, but I've hit that 3/4...

DragonCon Retrospective

Last night I was eating dessert in a crowded hotel bar, and said something loud and angry about Jedi powers or some other weird thing. The guy I was with laughed and said, "in any other crowd, all the other tables would be giving you weird looks right now." But this was the DragonCon crowd, and loud conversations about Jedi are the norm. That is why I'm so sad that DragonCon is ending for another year.

DragonCon has given me everything I've always wanted in a convention: awesome guests, big...

Last night I was eating dessert in a crowded hotel bar, a...

Last night I was eating dessert in a crowded hotel bar, and said something loud and angry about Jedi or some other weird thing. The guy I was with laughed and said, "in any other crowd, all the hoer tables would be giving you weird looks right now." But this was the DragonCon crowd, and loud conversations about Jedi are the norm. That is why I'm so sad that DragonCon is ending for another year.

DragonCon has given me everything I've always wanted in a convention: awesome guests, big name...

The DragonCon Parade

I need to tell you about the parade. When I heard there was a DragonCon costume parade I instantly thought of the old parades we used to do in elementary school on Halloween—a bunch of people in costumes shuffling through the school. Those parades were boring, and kind of weird and sad, and I figured this would be the same. I was incredibly wrong.

The DragonCon parade is a real parade. They shut down several city blocks, people line the streets long in advance just to get a good view, and...

Nerdi Gras

Yesterday I waited in a 90-minute line to see Admiral Adama talk about when he thought he first got intimate with President Roslin. Then I walked through three hotel lobbies packed with more naked flesh than a beach in LA, and finished the day with a Magic tournament where everyone was drinking buckets—literal buckets—of rum.

I am at DragonCon.

DragonCon, for those who don't know, is the party con of the geek calendar. You go to Worldcon to meet editors and agents and talk about writing; you g...

Going to DragonCon

Tomorrow I leave for DragonCon, around 9:30 in the morning on Thursday. I'm driving to the airport with Peter, Brandon Sanderson's assistant, and there we will meet Isaac, who did a lot of the art in Brandon's new The Way of Kings. Isaac and I will be sharing a hotel room, by which I mean that he will spend the week decomposing in my hotel bathtub. It should be lots of fun for everyone who isn't related to Isaac.

I don't have a lot of specifics planned; this will be a "wander around and...

This is what you need to do tomorrow

I read a lot of stuff, in a lot of different genres. The last three books I finished were Patient Zero (a hyper-violent paramilitary zombie novel), The Graveyard Book (a sweet and wacky urban fantasy middle grade novel) and Kitchen Confidential (a ribald behind-the-scenes restaurant memoir). When people ask what I read I usually say "books," and leave it at that, because I honestly don't know from one day to the next what kind of book is going to interest me, and I'll pick something up and...

Writing a short story: part 7

The past few days I've given a post-writing review of what I did and how. Today I thought it might be more helpful to talk about my pre-writing process and how I get started.

The first thing I do is look at my outline, which in this case is pretty simple: a single sentence describing pinch 2 as "the posse attacks the necromancer in his lair, things go horribly wrong, and they get killed/captured." With that in mind, I take stock of where the story is so far: I know who's on the posse, I know w...