I’ve known for some time that I need to get my social media shit together.
Like many people, I’m sure, I have a love-hate relationship with social media.
Category Archives: Writing
Thoughts on Reading Through My Novel’s Third Draft
Three drafts of my WIP: first (in the box), second (blue), and third (clear)
In truth, the title to this post should actually be as follows:
“Thoughts on Reading Through My Novel’s Third Draft and Completing My Fourth Draft at More or Less the Same Time”.
Because that is how it went down.
(Church) Life in the Middle Ages (Medieval Mondays #9a)
In the medieval world, the influence of the Church was ubiquitous.
The average modern inhabitant of the western world, even a religious one, might struggle to conceive of how much this was the case.
Thoughts on Having an Excerpt of My Novel Read By a Literary Agent
I’ve always believed that I’m a good writer. But at the same time, I’ve always believed I still have much to learn.
At the intersection of these two opposing ideas is the place where I wonder whether, at this moment, I’m good enough for traditional publication.
Whether my historical fiction WIP, which I’ve believed in long enough to have now gone through three (soon to be four) drafts, is now good enough to at least pique the interest of a publishing professional, let alone snag and hold that interest for the duration.
War and Peace (and War and Peace) in the Middle Ages (Medieval Mondays #8c)
If there’s one aspect of medieval knights that tends to be grossly exaggerated in mainstream media, it’s the amount of time they spent in open warfare.
To begin with, as previously discussed in my post on the feudal system, a “knight’s fee”—that is, the assorted obligations a vassal owed his lord in exchange for the land he lived upon—was both passive and active in nature.
On the Horseshoe Theory of Plotting vs. Pantsing
It’s one of the first questions writers ask each other upon meeting for the first time:
Are you a plotter…
(outliner)
(architect)
…or a pantser
(discovery writer)
(gardener)?
Thoughts on Completing My Novel’s Third Draft
And then there were three: first (green), second (blue), and third (clear) drafts of my WIP
It almost happened too fast for me to have any thoughts on the process at all.
Compared to the marathon of completing the second draft of my historical fiction WIP—which amounted to a complete rewrite of a draft written years ago—there was no way, I told myself, that I’d spend another year on draft three.
Or even the better part of a year
How to Keep Creating While the World is Going to Shit
It can feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns.
The world at large has always been a tumultuous place, particularly with the advent of new online media entities, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle of network news making us more aware than at any other time in history of the shit going down across the globe.
Lately, however, it seems it’s not just greater access to the news that’s making the world seem so untenable, but rather the quality of the news as well.
Chivalry Was Already Dying in the Middle Ages (Medieval Mondays #8b)
Few aspects of medieval history capture the imagination quite like the medieval knight.
The chivalric ideal
At the same time, few aspects of 13th century medieval history are as grossly misrepresented in mainstream entertainment as the medieval knight.
My previous post about knights in the Middle Ages touched on how the process of becoming a knight involved training in manners, music, and poetry when a young boy was a page, and sacred vigil and dedication of his sword when a squire was elevated to knighthood.
How I’m Spending My Fall, 2017
Autumn is coming
I’ll be spending my fall, in short, doing even more work.
In my previous post, I wrote about my non-summer.
That is to say, about how, despite having spent all of August away in Nova Scotia, the province of my birth, I passed the duration of it performing three different forms of work in what made for a month’s worth of gruelling 18-hour-days.
Janna G. Noelle 