Author: harmamae
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The Portuguese Echo
As you may know, I’m currently in Brazil–which means I need to know Portuguese to communicate. The area I’m in (northeast Brazil) has very few people who know English. I tried to learn as much Portuguese as I could before I got here, but it’s been a challenge for sure! At first, when I arrived…
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Things I’ve Learned From Blogging – 6 Months In
Update: If you want to know what I think about blogging 13 years later in 2024, you can read that here. Now that it’s July, I’ve been blogging for six solid months. Time to evaluate if I’ve learned anything. Fiction has always been my writing interest – though I have had a few non-fiction articles…
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3 Things That Scare Me About Travelling to Brazil
In psychology, they tell you that the closer you get to an event, the more your excitement increases – and the more your anxiety increases. In fact, your anxiety rises faster than your excitement. Yes, that’s why they make you buy your plane tickets ahead of time. You can’t back out so easily. Don’t get me wrong,…
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Prolific Vs. Perfectionist – What is the Best Way to a Lasting Writing Career?
Is it better to churn out hundreds of books that are mediocre, or just a couple that are really, really good? A few weeks ago, I mentioned how it is a general rule that writers need to publish around three novels before they establish their name in the industry. This means, of course, that a…
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Travel? Research? – Getting Your Setting Right
OR: Write What You Know, Or Risk What You Don’t Know I always wonder if writers have visited or lived in the places they write about, and if they haven’t, how they feel comfortable enough writing about places they’ve never been. I’m always incredibly afraid of messing the place up and getting some hypercritical reader…
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Strange Flotsam in My Bedroom – A Photo-essay
Cleaning your room can unearth the oddest things you forgot you had. I’m a bit of a packrat – a bad habit – so it was high time to do a deep cleaning and clear some stuff out. It’s a wrench to part with some of these things. In fact, most of these I ended…
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It’s the Readers’ Fault! Why Bad Writing is Called Good
OR: Don’t Blame Them, They Didn’t Notice the Difference Anyway Authors agonize over metaphors. They might spend ages debating word choice. They careful revise their sentence structure. What would you say if someone told you readers rarely notice this kind of thing anyway? I’m a poor student, and like many a poor student I participate…
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Update on the Splayed Novel
As you can see from the picture, my organizational system for keeping track of the plot of my novel is getting unwieldy. (For comparison, see the picture in this post). On the plus side, I am one tenth of the way through! The trick now is to not bog down in the middle part, but…
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Does Writer’s Block Exist?
Lately, I’ve been coming across numerous writers who insist writer’s block doesn’t exist – it’s just an excuse for writers not to write. I can kind of see that point of view. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure writer’s block exists, because I suffered from it for five years. “Writer’s block is a fabrication,”…
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Luck of the First-Time Novelist
Conventional wisdom in the writing world says that it takes at least three published novels to establish your name in the public eye. Don’t even think about quitting your day-job until then. But then, while leisurely reading the morning newspaper, I come across the name of Shilpi Somaya Gowda, whose first novel sold 300,000 copies…
Hmm... 