Ksenia Anske's Blog, page 59
February 8, 2014
My journey as a non-native English speaker & writer
A non-native English speaker (like me) and my blog reader asked this question: "Hello Ksenia!! I was visiting your blog and I was thinking why not sharing your journey as a non-native speaker writer!I don't know if you have already written something similar but I think it would be very interesting and useful to share some tips!I mean the ways that helped you to encounter the difficulties of writing in English which is not your first language."
Yes, for those of you who d...
February 4, 2014
The best sellers rank mystery, and letting your readers sell your book
As I'm writing this, I'm high, high on the fact that all 3 SIREN SUICIDES books shot to top 100 books on Amazon in their respective Paranormal & Urban category, #55, #44, and #39 each, the last one surprisingly the highest, although I got more reviews on the first one. Now, I'm still at a loss as to how exactly this whole ranking system works because in the Amazon Best Sellers Rank the books are #1,392, #1,148, and #956 in Free in Kindle Store. So, whatever does t...
February 2, 2014
On life, death, pain and happiness
I feel like I've been gutted, learning about Philip Seymour Hoffman's death a couple hours ago, and all this time I was wondering. Why? Why am I feeling this way? Why do I want to cry, why do my arms and legs feel numb, I didn't even know him personally, I've seen only a few films he was in, I'm not a hardcore fan, then why? And I think I know the answer. He was unhappy. That's what hit me, this realization that he simply wasn't happy. He took drugs. Why do we take drugs? To dull the pain, t...
February 1, 2014
How to write 4,000+ words a day
Yet another reader,Katya Pavlopoulos, asked me this question: "How do you do that?! 4K in one day?! Explain this sorcery to me please." Let me describe to you my current routine, or ritual, or whatever you want to call it, and see if you can extract some useful information out of it for yourself. I've blogged before about my schedule before, and it hasn't changed much since then, except now I write for longer hours. I'm actually able to break around 2pm to go pick up...
January 28, 2014
How getting hit by a truck made me quit my job to write full time
One of my readers, Caitlin Plavala, asked me this: "Have you already made a blog post about getting hit by that truck? Because I have some questions.Like a wake up call for suicidal people like me who think getting hit by a truck sounds nice. Gory details of pain, idk.I think there is a misconception that getting seriously injured will solve all of our problems." And I will oblige by telling this little story here, the one I touched upon in another blog post, a while...
January 24, 2014
It's okay to be wrong, and what does WRONG mean anyway?
I've been pondering for a while what to write about this time, as several things happened this week, all of them sorta kinda pointing in the same direction. Number one, I had a breakdown, thinking I suck, my writing sucks, and I wanted to quit. Like, for 1 hour I wanted to quit, for real. Then I got really mad for thinking that and wrote 5K words. I got over it. But other little things kept happening, and I started thinking, what the hell? Why do I suddenly doubt mys...
January 22, 2014
Chuck Wendig on why he doesn't write guest posts
It's been a while since I've hosted a guest author. One of them was practically jumping out of his pants to guest post on my blog. I tortured him, of course, by making him wait. Well, here you go then. PLEASE WELCOME Chuck Wendig, a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He's the author of BLACKBIRDS, DOUBLE DEAD and DINOCALYPSE NOW, and is co-writer of the short film PANDEMIC, the feature film HiM, and the Emmy-nominated digital narrative COLLAPSUS. He lives in Pennsylvania with wife, ta...
January 17, 2014
Crafting mystery without frustrating the reader
Now this, my lovely munchkins, is the shit I'm struggling with right now. As of this day, when this blog post gets published, I'm 40K words into IRKADURA, and I've got plot upon plot in my head spinning like crazed monkey tails, twisting and turning into pretzels. I'm afraid to spill it all at once, worrying that it will be too soon for the reader, and I'm also worried that it might be too late and the reader might guess everything already. On top of it all I'm worried...
January 14, 2014
Show versus tell
Amazing how in the years of writing my blog, I've never touched on this subject. How did it get skipped? Perhaps because it's spoken about everywhere all the time, so it became one of those obvious things everyone heard about and is therefore sick of. I dunno. Let me try a crack at it and see what you think. Of course it's all about showing and not telling, as we have been told by teachers, writing peers, and all the other smart folk who have written awesome shit and a...
January 11, 2014
Closing the gap between hating your writing and loving it
No, I'm not in absolute love with my writing, if that's what you're thinking, and that's exactly why I wanted to write this post, because of daily struggle with the voice shouting in my head YOUR WRITING SUCKS YOUR WRITING IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. It gets the better of me sometimes, and I'm sure it does the same to you. Lately, though, while writing IRKADURA, I started feeling a little better. Like, for example, when I'm asked to read my work out loud, and when I'm reading f...
