Darius Jones's Blog: A Writer Begins, page 27

Vote for “The Hatchlings” in Fiction Vortex’s Readers’ Choice Poll

Fiction Vortex has posted their Readers’ Choice Poll for August. Please stop by and vote for my story, “The Hatchlings” in the poll.

You can find it here:

http://www.fictionvortex.com/2013/08/readers-choice-poll-for-august-2013/

If the story wins the poll it will be mentioned on the Fiction Vortex website. Most importantly, it’s a great thing to point future publishers toward.

Thanks for all your support!

Darius

My Historical Novella is Free Today

My historical novella, “The Man Who Ran from God,” is free today, Sept. 2, in the Kindle store.

It’s a retelling of the Jonah myth with a bit of a lighter tone. Drop by and pick it up for free today.

Enjoy,

Darius

The Craft: Rules for Writing, #4: Dedicated Time

[This is part of a continuing series on the craft of writing fiction.]

We’ve covered a lot of ground on my rules of writing, but there are still two to go. Today, is another simple and easily explained rule, (just like the first one). Again, the trick is in actually doing it.

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It’s simply this: Dedicate Time to writing. If you want to make progress with your writing you have to dedicate time to the process, time when you’re not doing ANYTHING ELSE. That means no texting, no talking on the phone,...

How I Got My First Story Published

As reported last week, I finally “broke through the iron ring” and sold my first piece of fiction, The Hatchlings. It’s still up on the Fiction Vortex site, so read it while you can.

That being said, I wanted to write this post to give aspiring writers an “after action report” on how this happened so that you can do the same because all I need is more competition. Just kidding. In all honesty, here is what went down and some advice.

First of all, dear writers, don’t get put off by rejection. I...

My Historical Novella is Free Today

My historical novella, “The Man Who Ran from God,” is free in the Kindle store today, August 19.

It’s a retelling of the Jonah myth with a bit of a lighter tone. Drop by and pick it up for free today.

Enjoy,

Darius

My First Short Story Gets Published

My short story “The Hatchlings” was published today on Fiction Vortex. It’s the first time anything I’ve written has been accepted for publication. I heard the news a couple of weeks ago, but wanted to wait before it went live to share the news.

The story is set in the distant future. A man visits the planet Kaldar where a forbidden and brutal ritual, the Zakir, is conducted. He plans to gain the confidence of the Kaldarians, see the ritual and betray them by sharing his story with the rest of...

The Craft: Rules for Writing, Rule #3: The Elvis Principle

Alright, we’ve covered the basics. The two most fundamental rules for writing: Get Black on White and NO CRITIC. If you follow those rules you’ll pump out lots of raw material without stopping to criticize yourself.

But that’s just the start. What do you write about? What’s worth writing? And how do you keep going? I’ll handle those topic in greater depth later, but I want to talk about something even more basic today.

There’s a lot of advice out there for writers. “Show, don’t tell,” “Write...

The Craft: Rules for Writing, Rule #2: NO CRITIC

[This is part of a continuing series on the art of writing fiction.]

Well, I want to get back to my “Rules for Writing.” Today, I bring you my second rule. It’s the second most important rule and is a natural compliment to the first rule, “Get Black on White.” If you follow the second rule you’re guaranteed to get plenty of black on white.

The second rule is: NO CRITIC.

This simply means that when you’re awriter, you’re a writer, not a critic. You MUST turn off the inner critic and let the writ...

The Craft: Rules for Writing, Rule #2

[This is part of a continuing series on the art of writing fiction.]

Well, I want to get back to my “Rules for Writing.” Today, I bring you my second rule. It’s the second most important rule and is a natural compliment to the first rule, “Get Black on White.” If you follow the second rule you’re guaranteed to get plenty of black on white.

The second rule is: NO CRITIC.

This simply means that when you writer, you’re a writer, not a critic. You MUST turn off the inner critic and let the writing...

The Library of Lost Books One Year Later

On July 12 of last year, I launched my first novel and second published work, The Library of Lost Books.

At the time I was annoyed with the fact that there were so few stats out there about how many sales a first-time novelist could expect if they went the e-publishing route. I want to knock a hole through that wall to let the day light in, so today I’m publishing the stats for the first year of The Library of Lost Books collected via my Kindle stats from Amazon. Here they are.

Stats from July...