Ksenia Anske's Blog, page 27

How I make money self-publishing and giving books away for free

Art by Paul Fuentes

Tyler asked: "Ms. Anske, I very much admire your writing and work ethic and I was just wondering how you do this...how do you make enough money to support your bills and family when you give away your books for free? That is something that has confused me and it would be great if you could explain to me how that works. The only reason I ask is because that is my dream life. I want to write all day and be at home with my kids and take them to new and wondrous places with...

To strip naked feels to be clothed

Photography by RenéTreece Roberts

One other amazing thing that came out of the Promoting Passion Convention and our conversation with René was me trusting her to take a picture of me naked. I've been wanting to do this for years, to overcome my hate for my body and to begin loving it, begin seeing it through the eyes of others as a body, skin and flesh and bone, and not as an object to handle and hurt and invade.

It was chilly in the night, after the hot sun of the day, and I shivered as I...

The lies we tell thinking they're truths

Art by KwangHo Shin

I've spent three magical days at Brooke Shaden's Promoting Passion Convention that have exposed a big fat lie I was telling myself. More, I was called on it and made to understand that as long as I keep repeating it, it'll be true simply because it's the story I believe and make others believe, the story that I've been told by adults when I was a child,the story that's been running most of my adult life, the story that continues causing me pain. And guess who the source...

Dialogue beats, or how to perfect your dialogue

Illustration by Alex Jenkins

A phenomenon occurred. Though I should be hardly surprised about it. Reading books on writing saturated my mind to the point where I can no longer read a book and not analyze its structure. And the worst (or best?) part is, when reading dialogue, I suddenly see the emotional subtext underneath it and whether or not it's done right. By "right" I don't mean it adheres to some unbreakable rules, as there is no right way to write. By "right" I mean the reaction it...

Short story: Mom and Son Battle

Illustration by Anya Milioutina

We wrote a super-short story with Peter in about 15 minutes. I wrote one sentence, he wrote another. It was a battle of sentences, and the resulting story became a story of a battle in itself. You decide who wrote what. (We shall try to do it more often, it was fun.)

MOM AND SON BATTLE

An epic story by Peter Ustyugov and Ksenia Anske

They wanted to kill each other.To throw each other on a railroad to get smashed by a train and satisfyingly see their guts fall o...

3 ways sentences turn

Image source

I was going to write you a whole whiny post on how I can't sleep, and how writers and sleep are enemies, but my brain decided otherwise. I keep discovering new things every day, it seems, and this particular one helped me today in writing killer sentences. So of course I had to share it with you. Remember the post on having every sentence turn? Well, it's even deeper than that. Turns out, a sentence can turn three ways, and it's up to you which way you want to turn it, and acc...

Theme, symbolism, metaphors, and more

Illustration by Jun Cen

I thought this was going to be a straightforward post, but the more I read about theme and the more I work at detecting it in the novels I read, the more I see that it's an elusive truth that is multilayered and can mean many things to many people, and even to the author it's a truth that can be appear as a singular vision, or can change and fluctuate and focus and dissolve and continue forming as the book is written. As such it is a feeling, an understanding of the...

I hate leaving the house

Illustration by James R. Eads

Every time I do, I have to battle with some man bred on patriarchy and sexism. We took a bus today with Peter to test out the new route to school, plus for me to exercise my knee before the trip to Colorado. On my way back I walked to a bus stop and said "Good morning!" to an old man and smiled.He smiled back and said, "Do you have a boyfriend?"

I should be on constant alert for this type of behavior, given my life history of being viewed as a sex object, but n...

7 Types of Point of View and why they're important

Illustration by Matt Chase

Here I was, learning all about plotting and theme and getting ready to write a post for you on theme and genres, and BAM! I up and stumble on Point of View types (POVs from here on) and realize my theme post has to wait. Worse. I realize I might've done terrible POV shifts in the current draft of TUBE (never mind my other books, I'm not even going to think about that) which are unforgivable and need to be fixed, and it goes even worse from here. I'm not entirely...

Novel structure: from WORD to SENTENCE to BEAT to SCENE to ACT

Illustration by Crystal Zapata

What I'm about to tell you will sound insane. I ask you to put your sanity aside and join me on a wild ride. Of math. Yes, math. I know. I hate it too. But I love a certain type of math that helps me not think about math when I'm writing a novel. And hell, who knows, maybe I'm a closet mathematician who decided to become a novelist just to spite the mathematician. I better stop.This is starting to turn into a story.

What I'm about to tell you is very simple. I...