Taylor Hohulin's Blog, page 3

Deciding What’s True

I recently published a story called The Box Is Protection, Not Prison, and the idea for it started with a simple question my friend asked a few months back:

How do you decide what’s true?

My first thought was to tell him we don’t get to decide what’s true. Reality isn’t up to us.

But then Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth the word of the year. Then fake news came to mean not just stories from websites that invented facts to prank or deceive, but also stories from biased publications, or...

Exploding Robots and Instructive Feelings

A close friend and I recently had a heated argument about Iron Man.

I know. Bear with me.

Personally, I love that egocentric, wisecracking billionaire. Flawed heroes are my jam.

My friend? Not so much. She likes her good guys good and her bad guys bad. If you ask her, heroes should be heroic.

The crux of our disagreement was over the ending of Iron Man 3, when, in a show of devotion to Pepper Potts, Tony Stark destroys his Iron Man suits. For me, that was a touching moment. Tony takes the sou...

Creator’s Guilt and Geeky Resolutions

This year, I got geeky with my New Year’s Resolution.

I decided to set a hard, fast goal for the numberof words I wanted to get writtenin 2017, but more importantly, I decided to create a spreadsheet to track my progress.

Oh, yes. A spreadsheet. Complete with a graph to track my monthly productivity, cells with pre-programmed formulas to calculate my average words per day, and even percentage trackers to see how my monthly and overall progress is going.

To be honest, there are days when I’m m...

Writer’s Block and the Good Hard Thing

I was certain I had writer’s block.

I had a spare hour and a half before I had to be somewhere.The good writer who hangs out on one of my shoulders told me this was the perfect time to make some progress on my new project.

But that wasn’t the only writer talking. There was abad writer on myother shoulder. He told me I had writer’s block. There would be more time to writein the afternoon. I’d just had a big writing day the day before, so I needed some recharge time.I hadn’t gotten to play vide...

NaNoWriMo Wrap Up

Quick background: My goal for NaNoWriMo this year was to write, edit, and publish a novella in 30 days. The last three blogs tell a little more about that process if you want to learn more.

Well, I did it. In 30 days, I went from a little note on my phone with a bare-bones plot outline to a completed novella about workout plans, buff zombies, and eight-foot-tall babies wearing fake mustaches. This book could absolutely be better, but that’s the point of the Crimson Ace books. They’re not supp...

NaNoWriMo Week 3 Update

If you’re just jumping in and need background, I wrote a post hereabout why I’m going to write, edit, and publish a novella in the month of November.

Last Tuesday, I finished the rough draft for a brand new novella. That put me right at two weeks of writing, which is perfect, because it left me with a little overtwo weeks to edit. With the way my schedule has been these past three weeks, I couldn’t have asked for much better.

But even with sixteen days to edit, format, and publish, I know I’m...

NaNoWriMo Week 2 Update

If you’re just jumping in and need background, I wrote a post hereabout why I’m going to write, edit, and publish a novella in the month of November.

Another week down, and I’m still on track. I’m almost done with the rough draft for The Crimson Ace – in fact, I’m expecting to finish it this week, which would be nice. That would give me two weeks to go back and do some editing, and this one will definitely need some editing. I mentioned at the start that I don’t want to agonize over comma pla...

NaNoWriMo 2016 Week 1 Update

Last week, I wrote a blog about my goal for National Novel Writing month: Write, edit, and publish a novella in November. I’m writing the next installment in my series about a pizza delivery guy who accidentally absorbs the essence of the god of pride and is forced to become a superhero, and five days into the process, book two is proving to be just as fun to write as the first was.

When the month kicked off, I was seriously worried that I might struggle to get everything done in time, but I’...

Apologies to Mr. Quiller-Couch

One of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Arthur Quiller-Couch. Somebetter-known names have made variations of the quotemore popular, but the original is still my favorite:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obeyit—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.Murder your darlings.

If I was going to throw one quote at a new writer, this would be it. It’s the best way I know to illustrate that surprisingly difficul...

Life Outside the Pages

That picture up there iswhat nearly five years of writing looks like. All that time spent dreaming up new ideas, finding spare moments tohammer out a thousand words, wondering if the book is good enough, wondering if you’regood enough…itall boils down to this pileof paper and ink just a few inches high.

There’s a weird sort ofbeauty in the amount of time it takes to write a novel. Most days, I’d love to be able to pump outa new book in the amount of time it takes you to read it, butwhen I re...