Sympathy for the protagonist is a great tool for drawing readers into a story. If the reader can identify with the character’s struggles and desires, they become invested in what happens. That leads to late nights of anxious page-turning. A sympathetic character has obstacles they must overcome. These can be internal or external, but the [...]

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I received an email from Wizards of the Coast publishing on Tuesday, notifying me that they are declaring Maiden of Pain out of print. This is pretty common practice for publishers. Unless you’re a bestseller or under contract for future titles, you’re a candidate for pruning. I fall under neither category. The email stirred up [...]

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It appears Dragon Magazine is now accepting short fiction submissions (thanks for the heads up, Erik). I’ve had a short story featuring Iuna, the young girl who caused Ythnel all the problems in Maiden of Pain, circulating in my head for several months. This appears to be the perfect opportunity to get it out. I’ll [...]

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Prologues are developing into a pet peeve of mine. I’m reading Knife of Dreams, and Jordan once again starts off with a 100-page prologue. Why wasn’t this a chapter? Somewhere along the line, I came up with a pretty specific definition of what a prologue was. It is not based on any dictionary definition, as [...]

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After reading a great article on J. A. Konrath‘s blog about marketing tools, I decided to create a MySpace profile over the weekend. I also tried out a friend-adding bot. I found a Forgotten Realms group and used the bot to send out about 200 “add as friend” requests to the group members, along with [...]

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