L.G. Estrella's Blog, page 45

Progress Report 16-07-2018

My apologies for the lack of updates over the past month. I have been grappling with the second draft of Divine Interference, which will be the sequel to Divine Assistance. There was a certain amount of wrangling involved since certain short stories decided to be more troublesome than I would have liked. Oh well. That’s how writing is. Sometimes, everything just works, and then there are those times where you charge into battle with your proverbial lance only to find that you’re tilting not a...

Necessary Detail

One of the most difficult things to do as a writer is to decide which details to include in a scene. For the most part, you can’t simply include every single possible detail in each scene. It simply isn’t feasible. Not only would the reader probably get bored but your story would also become obnoxiously long. Instead, you need to focus on necessary details.

But what does ‘necessary’ mean? One way to think about it is to consider the following points:

Plot Characters Setting

If something is...

World Building #1 – Logical Consequences

There are many different ways to approach world building, and you will undoubtedly find that some of them work better for you than others. What I’ll be doing in this series of posts is to go through some of the approaches that have worked for me.

The first approach that I’ll be covering is the logical consequences approach. The core of this approach is to start with a premise, usually one related to the setting, and to explore the logical consequences of that premise. In other words, to build...

Progress Report 17-06-2018

I just thought I’d let you guys know what I’m up to. I am currently working on the sequel to Divine Assistance. It currently consists of fourteen stories. So far, I’ve done the first draft, which has a total of roughly 56, 000 words. I expect that number to rise as I move into the second draft.

Words Aren’t All That Matter

When it comes to public speaking, what you say isn’t always as important as how you say it. You could have the most brilliant and insightful speech imaginable, but if your delivery is lacklustre, the odds are good that you’ll be ignored. This doesn’t really sound fair – and it isn’t – but successful public speaking means dealing with this unfortunate reality.

Perhaps the most obvious feature of your speech that people will latch onto is the speed with which you speak. If you speak too quickly...

Looking Back To Help You Move Forward

It can be very easy to lose sight of the improvement you make to your writing. This is especially true for incremental improvements. In the same way that someone going through a growth spurt might not realise just how much they’ve grown until after they’ve stopped growing, so too can someone who is constantly improving their writing not realise how much they’ve improved until they’ve had a chance to look back on their previous efforts.

Improving your writing can often seem like a monumental t...

Happy Mother’s Day

A Happy Mother’s Day to everyone.

And a most Happy Mother’s Day to my mother.

Did you know that the very first short story I ever wrote involved space pirates, grenades, and people being thrown out of airlocks? I was… four or five, I think. My mother, wonderful mother that she was, barely batted an eye at the fact that her young child was writing something that involved space-pirate-related murder. Instead, she was happy that I was writing a story of my own.

Best mother ever.

Tools

One of the most important things you can do as a writer is to constantly add tools to your toolbox. What do I mean by tools? A story can be divided into several areas:

Technique Plot Characters Setting Ideas and themes

Adding new tools mean diversifying and improving your skills in these different areas.

Technique is all about the technical aspects of writing. How large is your vocabulary? How good is your punctuation? How varied and fitting is your sentence and paragraph structure? Adding...

The Normal Guy

One of the ways that I like to create humour in my stories is through the perspective of the ‘normal guy’. Obviously, the normal guy doesn’t actually have to be male or even all that normal. What matters is that they are more normal, at least at first glance, than everyone else around them.

Jake from The Galactic Peace Series is a good example of this. He grew up on what was basically a farming world. His childhood was fairly normal and so was much of his young adulthood prior to being expell...

Galactic Diplomacy is now Available on Amazon!

Galactic Diplomacy, the second part of The Galactic Peace Series, is finally here! The adventures of Jake Smith continue as everyone’s favourite diplomat from The Galactic Peace Committee faces yet another round of diplomatic mayhem with an assortment of aliens that vary from cute and cuddly to utterly homicidal. Can Jake survive? Does he even want to? If he does, it won’t be easy. There are killer robots, tree people, and aliens who are ready and willing to go to war over volleyball and pizz...