I’ve been blogging on Tumblr for a month or two, and it was nice while it lasted. But Tumblr quickly became too small for me. There’s more I want to to with this website and blog than what Tumblr will allow. So, here we are, new home on the (ahem) old home.
Fifteen Years A WriterA Short History of S.C. Barrus
It’s been nearly a month since I started this blog chronicling the production of my novel Grim Curio. I haven’t spent much of that time talking about myself, and that’s been deliberate. But today I want to do something different and share the writing journey I’ve gone through over the last fifteen years. High School […]
Grim Curio’s Style Update
The weekend’s almost over, but I’ve got a lot of work done. I’ve been focusing on the style of Grim Curio. Check out the first couple paragraphs, all newly rewritten: The wailing of worn iron hinges ripped me awake. The sound grated. It squealed with an irregular rhythm, accompanied by constant popped corn sounds […]
41 Questions to Improve Your Writing and Critiquing
When refining, rewriting, editing and critiquing, what should you be looking for? Sentence structure? Character believability? Setting? Sometimes it can be a bit much to keep everything in your head, so I’ve written the following list of things I look for (or need to remind myself to pay attention to) in order to make my […]
From Mind to Paper: Creating a Character
Above: Ginko from Mushi Shi. Writing is a process. Prose don’t appear on paper perfectly executed. First drafts are a spew of consciousness, a firehose of concepts splattered haphazardly with the wrong words in the wrong order, the wrong setting with the wrong details, the wrong character featuring the wrong motivation. But you have to […]
Read Chapter 2
It’s been a while since I posted a critique ready excerpt of Grim Curio, not for lack of writing though. I’ve actually hit a flow that’s been pretty great, removing around 2,000 words and adding about 4,000 in the last two weeks. Progress. In this excerpt we meet a new POV (Point of View) character, […]
Ideas are a brewin’
Welcome to another Grim Curio production note, a post where I share something that I’m thinking about for a future scene. If you want to learn more about production notes, read this. The Nihilists Part of Grim Curio’s subtext involves a variety of groups that live in or around Oasis – the last city on […]
How to Harness the Critique Feedback Loop to Become a Better Writer
As I write my novel Grim Curio, I’ve been sharing excerpts on /r/DestructiveReaders and my development diary to get feedback. At first I did this just to get an idea of what people thought of my work in progress. Then a pattern emerged, and through it I found myself becoming a better writer. I’m calling this pattern […]
The Layered Universe
Production Note I’ve been talking about my novel in progress for a couple of weeks now, and there are some topics that I’ve brought up that need some fleshing out. Grim Curio is a kind of Fantasy/Post Apocalyptic hybrid, so there’s a fair amount of world building in the subtext. Today I want to talk about […]
Grew up among the Nihilists in East Oasis. My parents taught me to burn the world around me, to finish the job of the Great Cleansing. Grim Curio, from Badass Writing Day