"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@ryancolvert
Prepping for NaNoWriMo!
OK, I admit it–I’ve been slacking off. There are excuses, of course: My mom has been dealing with some health issues; my job has been psychotically busy. But there’s always something, right? You have to figure out how to make progress anyway. So it’s time for me to shake off the cobwebs and focus hard on writing, and I’ve decided that NaNoWriMo is the ideal thing for that. I’ve been aware of…
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Writing Prompt: Imagine Life as a Ghost
Writing Prompt: Imagine Life as a Ghost
The writing prompt “Imagine life as a ghost” was posted on reddit today–this was my take on it: I stood in the rain and it passed through me. The jackets and umbrellas of my family flapped and bucked in the October wind, but I didn’t feel it or smell the wet leaves that covered the ground. Preacher Davis read from his Bible only a few feet away—I was sure I’d recognize the words if I could hear…
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Recommended Book: “The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell” by David Corbett
Recommended Book: “The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell” by David Corbett
Crime thrillers and military thrillers are two of the largest sub-genres of the thriller family, and I’m not a big fan of either. There, I said it. You can revoke my thriller card now. In The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell, David Corbett packs both a crime thriller and a military thriller into one small novella. By all rights I should hate it, but the truth is that it’s great. The story begins…
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Vignette: "Worse than Death"
Vignette: “Worse than Death”
Getting sentenced to death is bad. Reading about your own execution because the St. Louis Post-Dispatch accidentally releases the story on their web site early is worse. After that, you would think that waking up in a pine box three days later would be a nice surprise. Not so much. Waking up didn’t surprise me—that’s what always happens when I die. The surprise was being in an actual pine box. I…
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Manuscript "done"
Manuscript “done”
Finishing a manuscript is an exciting time. It’s a huge milestone, right? You’ve been working on this project for months–maybe years–and finally you get to see the big stack of pages. You heft it and feel the weight. You take it to the dining table and drop it in front of your spouse or your mother and it thumps like someone just dropped a big-city copy of the Yellow Pages (if you still have one…
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Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving, World! I'm sending you my best wishes the day before the holiday, because I expect to be up to my gizzard in food and family tomorrow.
Why supernatural thrillers?
The awesome Rachel Aaron recently said this: https://twitter.com/Rachel_Aaron/status/624567677651128320 And it got me thinking about why I’m writing supernatural thrillers as opposed to any of the many other kinds (crime thrillers, medical thrillers, legal, military, cozies, etc, etc, etc). I mean, supernatural thrillers are obviously cooler, right? Right? Well, I think they’re cooler anyway. But…
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Recommended Book: "Monday's Lie," by Jamie Mason
Recommended Book: Monday's Lie, by Jamie Mason
Jamie Mason is one of many authors that I saw at ThrillerFest last week — she was speaking on a panel about “protagonists that rock.” It’s pretty typical at these panels for the moderator to introduce all the guests and say a little about their most recent book. In this case, when the moderator (Sandra Brannan) introduced Ms. Mason, she talked about Monday’s Lie and said some things that caught…
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Basic principles of story engineering
If you google “story engineering” you’ll quickly see that I’m not the first person to think of writing a story as a kind of engineering. I imagine that this seems strange to people who think of engineering as being more about calculation than creativity.
Let me describe to you the three fundamental things that I got out of my first Computer Science class. I think you’ll see immediately how these…
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How to choose a pen name
If you’ve read my About Ryan page then you already know that Ryan Colvert is a pen name. There are lots of reasons why authors use pen names — sometimes it’s business, sometimes it’s personal. In my case, it’s just that my real name is fairly easy to misspell or mispronounce. It seemed better to give people a name that they can easily share.
Once you decide you want to use a pen name, how do you…
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2015 Thriller Award Finalists Announced
2015 Thriller Award Finalists Announced
Check out the list of Thriller Award finalists for 2015!
This is going to be my reading list… it’s a great way to keep up with some of the best new work in the field.
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Learning from my mistakes
My last few blog posts were the prelude to a thriller that I started and then abandoned half-way through. I had stumbled on the remains of that project and decided that it would be fun to post a bit of it.
It wasfun to read that old material, but it was also valuable to look at it critically with the benefit of a little distance and experience. There are things I still like about it, but there…
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Prelude to Southern Blood (part 3 of 3)
Start with part 1.
This material is (a) for mature readers and (b) contains elements some readers may find disturbing.
When the workers found his body the next morning, they only knew it was him because his truck was nearby. The Adjudant’s report stated that there was no way to know how he died, since jackals had found his body during the night and little was left of it.
Before long, the…
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Prelude to Southern Blood (part 2 of 3)
Start with part 1. This material is (a) for mature readers and (b) contains elements some readers may find disturbing.
His other fears about the position had been farther from the mark. True, it was quite hot here, but one acclimated. His quarters beside the river caught the breeze from the water, and the workers, being native, seemed to hold up well in the heat.
And certainly Paris was far…
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Prelude to Southern Blood (part 1 of 3)
Southern Blood was the working title of a thriller that I started and shelved. I hadn’t yet learned the benefits of outlining and the story wandered off into the weeds somewhere around the half-way point, never to return. Still, there were parts that I liked, and it seems a shame to let them rot in a file.
The prelude to Southern Blood is self-contained enough that I can share it as a series…
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Planning your novel with Janice Hardy
You may already be familiar with Janice Hardy from her Fiction University blog. If not, it’s certainly worth taking a look at.
This morning, I was able to attend a workshop that Janice hosted titled Planning Your Novel in 10 Easy Steps. I thought it would be worthwhile to post a mini-review for those of you who might be looking for novel-planning assistance.
Janice herself is friendly,…
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Why, when and how to use personification
If you write fiction for adults, you may heard this advice about personification: Don’t use it.
Personification has a justifiably bad reputation. It’s been used so badly, so often, that some readers (including some editors) have lost all taste for it. That means it’s out of fashion, and you use it at your own risk.
Still… maybe you’re not entirely ready to throw away a technique that has roots…
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