Ksenia Anske's Blog, page 41
June 13, 2015
7 ways to describe your protagonist in 1st person POV
Leo Zaccari asked: "What is the best way to describe your protagonist in 1st person POV?It always sounds forced and unnatural. What are some good ways to do it and make it sound natural?"
Excellent question. I think there are as many ways to do it as there are writers, and ultimately you will find your own way. I have accidentally stumbled on a couple tricks while writing my first book, and later I have seen other writers employing other tricks and stole those...
June 12, 2015
SKY, a short story by Peter Ustyugov (completed)
You have asked me to post the rest of my son's story, so here it is. He has dutifully typed it up, while moaning, "This is taking forever! Mom, can you type for me? Please?" And every time I told him that you guys loved his story, he told me, "I don't want to be a writer. Nope!" I will continue trying to convince him of his talent. In the meantime, enjoy.
(Oh, and I finished editing the last draft of The Badlings! It's here, and more blog posts are coming about it and other exciting stuff. Ju...
June 8, 2015
My 12-year-old son wrote a story called SKY
My son handed me a notebookand said, "I wrote a story. Can you tell me what you think?" Then he quickly disappeared into his room. I was puzzled, intrigued. Then I started reading it and I began smiling, then beaming, then laughing. Right off the start plenty of mystery, fantasy, bloody and gore. "That's my son all right," I thought and threw up the picture of the first paragraph online. A bunch of you asked to read the whole thing (9 whole pages!) so I photographed it and here it is.
May I p...
June 5, 2015
Does self-doubt ever go away?
Dylann Rhea asked: "Whenever I need writing advice or I start to doubt myself I always find that I come to you. I read your blog and it makes me feel better about whatever problem I'm having. I'm a writer and I'm almost ready for my second book to be edited. I've had two people beta read for me so far who've said they though the sequel was good. When I wrote my first book, as it got closer to being edited and self published, I became very doubtful of my story. I s...
May 31, 2015
I have discovered Lovecraft
These pages, the pages I'm reading, they're breathing. Although I have only read 3 of Lovecraft's stories so far—Dagon, The Statement of Randolph Carter, and Beyond the Wall of Sleep—each of them takes me out of the room and into a world that is so unlike anything I've ever readthat it makes me feel uneasy. There is something of gothic romanticism, and something of classic horror as penned by the Stokers and the Poes and the like, yet also something of dreamy fantasy and a bit of "emotional"...
May 29, 2015
Setting up a donation option
Raymond Bolton asked: "NicholasRossis says you set up a virtual tip jar to receive donations. Would you care to share how to do it?Since you had sales while you were giving away copies of your books, I assume you kept copies on Amazon selling for a price and gave the free copies away through your website? Am I correct? If not, would you care to share how you did it?"
Sure. There is no big secret.
To set up a donate button was my readers' idea. When I self-published my fi...
May 26, 2015
Focusing on your writing
Briana Morgan asked me to write a post on focus. How do you focus on your writing when there are a million distractions pulling at your poor mind in all directions? How do you manage to sit for hours and just write, without checking your phone or email or news or staring at a cat chasing a chicken across the road or getting sucked into research justifying it with the need to know exactly how many goats it takes to eat a field of blackberry bushes in a day?
Simple.
I wi...
May 24, 2015
Avoid holes in your first draft
Boy, the things The Badlings is teaching me. I don't know what it is about this book. Maybe it will be my watershed moment and I will look upon the chasm cleaved in my life, on one end of it written "before The Badlings," on another "after The Badlings," and I will seethe middle of it a thousand fiery dragons spurting up pillars of fire to remind me of what it was like. And I'll tell you what's it's like. It's gruesome. I'm learning one very valuable lesson writing...
May 20, 2015
We write out of loneliness
There are moments in everyone's life when something happens, something extraordinary, something so exquisite and exciting and overwhelmingthat we want to share it. We'resocial creatures, we're built that way. So we do. We start gushing to the first person we think will understand.
It goes like this.
At first we're swimming too deep in our own exuberance to be able to notice the reaction of the one listening to us (or pretending to listen). It's only after we manage to r...
May 18, 2015
20 things I learned from writing full-time for 3 years
3 years ago on May 14thI opened a new Word file, called it Ailen's Song (the first title for Siren Suicides) and started typing. "Have you ever met a siren? No, not the kind you read inbooks about. Not the one with fish tails, sweet voice and greenhair sitting on a rock somewhere in the ocean, luring infishermen. No, a real siren. The one with white hair and skin. Ithink it’s called “albino”, you know, with red eyes and stuff.Have you seen one like that? Of course not. Cause if you did,you’d...
