Sara Raasch's Blog, page 324
July 6, 2015
Hi! Loved Snow Like Ashes & can't wait for book 2! I wanted to ask though, if you don't mind, how do you keep track of your worlds? I'm writing my first fantasy and the world building has me incredibly paranoid. What if I said an area looks one way the
Ahhhh world building!
Okay, so, I could talk about world building for like way too freaking long. I’d bore you to tears. Luckily, I did a YouTube video wherein I very very briefly went over the general outline of questions I go through every time I start a new book. You can watch that here.
As far as keeping it all straight: I know a lot of people use Scrivener buuuuuuut I’m still one of the holdouts who uses Word. So I keep LOTS of lists – excel spreadsheets, word docs, etc. So many lists. I have lists for character physical descriptions/names/histories/families/traits; world details/countries/cities/cultures; anything and everything. Because, yeah, it gets very intimidating keeping it all straight, and I’ve learned the hard way not to rely on memory. Don’t expect yourself to remember it all! There’s no harm at all in creating references, as many as you need.
Hi! Loved Snow Like Ashes & can't wait for book 2! I wanted to ask though, if you don't mind, how do you keep track of your worlds? I'm writing my first fantasy and the world building has me incredibly paranoid. What if I said an area looks one way the
Ahhhh world building!
Okay, so, I could talk about world building for like way too freaking long. I’d bore you to tears. Luckily, I did a YouTube video wherein I very very briefly went over the general outline of questions I go through every time I start a new book. You can watch that here.
As far as keeping it all straight: I know a lot of people use Scrivener buuuuuuut I’m still one of the holdouts who uses Word. So I keep LOTS of lists – excel spreadsheets, word docs, etc. So many lists. I have lists for character physical descriptions/names/histories/families/traits; world details/countries/cities/cultures; anything and everything. Because, yeah, it gets very intimidating keeping it all straight, and I’ve learned the hard way not to rely on memory. Don’t expect yourself to remember it all! There’s no harm at all in creating references, as many as you need.
Snow Like Ashes is one of my favorite books! How did you become an author? Was it a hard process?
Thank you!
There’s loads of detailed advice online about how to become an author (querying, getting an agent, going on submission – back in the day, I used the AW Forums like whoa, and there’s also a crazy amount of great advice on Pub(lishing) Crawl) and it all says it way more eloquently than I ever could, but for me, it amounted to: not giving up. The only difference between a published author and an unpublished author is perseverance.
allthethingamabobs:
requested this at my library about a month...
requested this at my library about a month ago and they finally came through!
YAY LIBRARIES!!
reading-out-loud:
There are so many awesome new releases to look forward to this year !! ...
There are so many awesome new releases to look forward to this year !!
What are you all looking forward to most ?!
July 4, 2015
Short but accurate summaries of popular books/series: part 3
Incarceron: The cake is a lie
Curse Workers: Wizard Mafia
The Bone Season: Ghost Mafia
Snow Like Ashes: Everybody hates winter.
An Ember in the Ashes: *points at characters* f*** you, f*** you, f*** you, precious cinnamon roll too good for this world, f*** you, how did nobody kill you yet, f*** you, f*** me, f*** you
The Wrath and the Dawn: Talk shit, get hit. Or dismembered. Depends who you're talking shit to.
Chronicles of Nick: A textbook is needed in order to keep up with the mythology.
Obsidian Mirror: Wait, if you're evil, and they're evil, and everybody wants the evil time machine...then who's flying the plane?
I Am Number Four: Oh none of us have this very useful power? Wait a chapter.
Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel: If their name is carved on an old rock somewhere in the world, they're in this series.
Monument 14: Somebody kept saying "what's the worst that could happen" and the universe decided to answer.
Graceling: Heterochromia=superpowers, caution advised.
Uglies: Somehow, a group of people decide that lobotomizing the population of an entire planet is a valid method for maintaining world piece.
Percy Jackson: Main character's catchphrase is "wait, what?" In his defense, it's often appropriate.
Hunger Games: Television censorship laws get some major revisions.
