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Writing Excuses 8.34: Survivorship Bias 26 Aug 2013 | 05:22 am
When people who have succeeded at a given endeavor speak about their success, we are inclined to listen because hey, we’d like to succeed there as well. It’s critical to recognize the bias here. Survi...
Writing Excuses 8.33: Making Non-Human Characters Relatable 19 Aug 2013 | 03:00 am
How do you help your readers relate to the non-human characters in your fiction? The first question to answer is why you’re putting non-human characters in the piece to begin with. What are your goal...
Writing Excuses 8.32: Microcasting 12 Aug 2013 | 04:00 am
Microcasting! It’s what we call a Q&A, because it’s like several little podcasts in one! Here are the questions (you’ll have to listen to the show for the answers): How do you manage your workload? ...
Writing Excuses 8.31: Combining Dialogue, Blocking, and Description 5 Aug 2013 | 02:02 am
The combination of dialogue, blocking, and description, can be considered from a couple of directions. The first is the idea that we’re really talking about making every element do double or triple du...
Writing Excuses 8.30: Writing Reluctant Characters 29 Jul 2013 | 05:00 am
What’s a reluctant character? Well, it’s somebody who needs to be dragged along into the adventure, somebody who isn’t the sort of self-motivated, go-getter that we so often populate our books with. T...
Writing Excuses 8.29: Out of Excuses Retreat Q&A #1 22 Jul 2013 | 05:00 am
We recorded this episode in front of our live audience at the first-ever Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat. Here are the questions (you’ll have to listen for the answers): To Dan: How did you go ab...
Writing Excuses 8.28: Your First Contract 15 Jul 2013 | 04:46 am
We haven’t talked much about contracts in the past. Why not? Well, we’re not lawyers and we’re not agents, so our experience with contracts has been as parties to them. But there are things we can sti...
Writing Excuses 8.27: Chapter Breakdowns 8 Jul 2013 | 04:51 am
What determines our chapter breaks? How do we handle POV shifts, scene-sequel balance, and other considerations when we’re carving our stories into chapters? Dan starts with a discussion of the POV c...
Writing Excuses 8.26: Space Opera 1 Jul 2013 | 04:55 am
This week’s episode covers the perjoratively-named sub-genre, space opera. These are adventure stories in which the setting is futuristic, but in which the science is secondary. The lines are blurry, ...
Writing Excuses 8 25: Middle Grade with E.J. Patten 24 Jun 2013 | 03:00 am
Eric Patten joins us for a cast on Middle Grade fiction. His series, The Hunter Chronicles (Return to Exile and The Legend Thief have both been released) is delightful. As Dan points out, there’s no ...
